Taking prevention to the next step: implementation of a brief, sustainable frailty assessment in a cardiology clinic

BACKGROUND: Frailty measurement is recommended when assessing older adults with cardiovascular disease to individualise prevention and treatment. We sought to address this by incorporating routine gait speed measurement by clinicians into an outpatient preventive cardiology clinic. METHODS: Quality improvement (QI) project initiated at VA Boston in January 2015 to measure usual gait speed in m/s over a 4 m distance for patients aged 70 and older. The primary outcome was completion and documentation of 4 m usual gait speed. Data were manually extracted from the electronic health record. Frequency distributions and descriptive statistics are presented. INTERVENTIONS: Several change interventions were implemented over a 5-year period (January 2015–December 2019) addressing (1) stakeholder engagement and project champions, (2) staff education, (3) assessment space, (4) electronic health record template update and (5) sustaining the initiative. Statistical process control charts were used to monitor proportion of gait speed measurement and to detect shifts resulting from 5 phase change interventions. RESULTS: During this QI project, 178 patients aged 70 and older attended the clinic, accounting for 1042 individual clinic visits. Gait speed was measured at least once for 157 patients; 21 were never assessed. At the end of the first month (January 2015), gait speed was measured during 40% of clinic visits and rose to a median measurement rate of 78% at clinic visits during the 2018–2019 study period. An unanticipated result was the spread of the initiative to other cardiology clinics. CONCLUSIONS: Gait speed measurement was successfully embedded into clinic assessments for older adults at a cardiology clinic following targeted interventions. This project highlights the feasibility of incorporating a brief frailty assessment such as gait speed, into non-geriatric medicine clinics.