News & Events: Clinical Assessment Tools for Older Adults

UCSF News reports on a new tool to assess health risks for older adults designed for physicians to assess their geriatric patients in a medical setting: Calculating medical risk can be an inexact science, especially for older adults, with many factors from the environment to chronic diseases helping determine how long a person lives. Now, a UC San Francisco team has developed a tool that can help determine – and perhaps influence – senior citizens' 10-year survivability rates. This tool is designed for physicians to assess their geriatric patients in a medical setting. It is not meant for [...]

The NY Times reports on UCSF's development of interactive tools informing the treatment decision  based on the likelihood of death within six months to five years in various older populations : To help prevent overtesting and overtreatment of older patients — or undertreatment for those who remain robust at advanced ages — medical guidelines increasingly call for doctors to consider life expectancy as a factor in their decision-making. But clinicians, research has shown, are notoriously poor at predicting how many years their patients have left. Now, researchers at the University of [...]