Optimizing Drug Therapy Safety of Geriatric Orthopedic Patients by Providing Integrated Geriatric Care

Demographic change, accompanied by its complex requirements, represents a major challenge for today’s orthopedics and traumatology departments. The “geriatric patient”, is moving into focus, and increasingly requires geriatric-internal co-treatment in addition to orthopedic-injury surgery expertise. This retrospective case–control study investigated how the co-treatment by a geriatrician in orthopedic patients influences drug prescriptions, and whether and how an improvement in drug safety and more adequate pharmacotherapy can be achieved. The FORTA list established for the German-speaking region was used as the evaluation standard. Therefore, FORTA AB resulted from the total sum of the respective admissions or discharge medications, minus the FORTA-C and D hits. For the study, the FORTA categories C and D listed medications were considered particularly relevant because they are high-risk, and they were statistically reviewed during the study. A total of 54 patients in the study group (GOKM group) were treated according to the integrated geriatric orthopedic concept, compared to 59 patients in the reference group (OM group). In order to precisely test for an analysis of variance was performed with a mixed-design analysis of variance (ANOVA).