Publications by authors named "E Phelan"
Article Synopsis
- A study analyzed hospital transfers for older adults (65+) from 2008 to 2019, finding that over 11% of these transfers were potentially avoidable, meaning patients often did not receive necessary care post-transfer.
- Conditions most linked to avoidable transfers included transient cerebral ischemia, nonspecific chest pain, and syncope, with those conditions showing significantly higher rates of avoidability compared to other diagnoses.
- Factors influencing avoidable transfers included patient demographics (like being 85+ years old, female, or non-White) as well as characteristics of the hospitals involved, such as their size and profit status.
Importance: High-risk medications that contribute to adverse health outcomes are frequently prescribed to older adults. Deprescribing interventions reduce their use, but studies are often not designed to examine effects on patient-relevant health outcomes.
Objective: To test the effect of a health system-embedded deprescribing intervention targeting older adults and their primary care clinicians for reducing the use of central nervous system-active drugs and preventing medically treated falls.
Background And Objectives: Previous studies have found that falls among community-dwelling older people with dementia negatively impact the health and well-being of their relative/friend care partners. Limited studies have explored the challenges care partners experience because of older people's falls (including fall incidents and fall risks). We sought to investigate care partners' experiences of these challenges and how care partners responded.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Cognitive impairment and dementia have rising prevalence and impact the health care utilization and lives of older adults. Receipt of low-value (LV) care and underutilization of high-value (HV) care by individuals with these cognitive disorders may have negative consequences for patient health, health system efficiency, and societal welfare. Evidence on health care value among cognitively impaired individuals is limited; we thus ascertained receipt of LV and HV health care in older adults with normal cognition, cognitive impairment without dementia (CIND), and dementia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Little is known about how to prevent falls in community-dwelling older people with dementia. Although their care partners adopt various behaviors to prevent their falls, it is unclear if these behaviors reduce falls for those with different levels of fall risk.
Research Design And Methods: Linking the 2015 and 2016 National Health and Aging Trends Study and the 2015 National Study of Caregiving (NSOC), we identified 390 community-dwelling older people with dementia with 607 care partners.