Elder abuse is dramatically under-documented in electronic health records. Although structured EHR markers are commonly used in research to identify elder abuse cases in large cohorts due to their accessibility, their validity for capturing clinical EA concerns is unknown.
I was excited to contribute to work led by Joseph Shin, who was mentored by Lena Makaroun, with contributions from Hongwei Zhang, Maria K. Mor, and Naomi Shin, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) that explored the validity of administrative data markers for elder abuse identification in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) data.
We found that administrative markers of elder abuse in the EHR rarely corresponded with documented active clinical concerns, raising important questions about their validity as proxies for EA identification and highlighting the need for more standardized and clinician-friendly approaches to elder abuse documentation.