Objectives: (1) To demonstrate how a risk assessment tool modified to account for the COVID-19 virus during the current global pandemic is able to provide risk assessment for low-energy geriatric hip fracture patients. (2) To provide a treatment algorithm for care of COVID-19 positive/suspected hip fractures patients that accounts for their increased risk of morbidity and mortality.
Setting: One academic medical center including 4 Level 1 trauma centers, 1 university-based tertiary care referral hospital, and 1 orthopaedic specialty hospital.
Patients/participants: One thousand two hundred seventy-eight patients treated for hip fractures between October 2014 and April 2020, including 136 patients treated during the COVID-19 pandemic between February 1, 2020 and April 15, 2020.
Intervention: The Score for Trauma Triage in the Geriatric and Middle-Aged ORIGINAL (STTGMAORIGINAL) score was modified by adding COVID-19 virus as a risk factor for mortality to create the STTGMACOVID score. Patients were stratified into quartiles to demonstrate differences in risk distribution between the scores.
Main outcome measurements: Inpatient and 30-day mortality, major, and minor complications.
Results: Both STTGMA score and COVID-19 positive/suspected status are independent predictors of inpatient mortality, confirming their use in risk assessment models for geriatric hip fracture patients. Compared with STTGMAORIGINAL, where COVID-19 patients are haphazardly distributed among the risk groups and COVID-19 inpatient and 30 days mortalities comprise 50% deaths in the minimal-risk and low-risk cohorts, the STTGMACOVID tool is able to triage 100% of COVID-19 patients and 100% of COVID-19 inpatient and 30 days mortalities into the highest risk quartile, where it was demonstrated that these patients have a 55% rate of pneumonia, a 35% rate of acute respiratory distress syndrome, a 22% rate of inpatient mortality, and a 35% rate of 30 days mortality. COVID-19 patients who are symptomatic on presentation to the emergency department and undergo surgical fixation have a 30% inpatient mortality rate compared with 12.5% for patients who are initially asymptomatic but later develop symptoms.
Conclusion: The STTGMA tool can be modified for specific disease processes, in this case to account for the COVID-19 virus and provide a robust risk stratification tool that accounts for a heretofore unknown risk factor. COVID-19 positive/suspected status portends a poor outcome in this susceptible trauma population and should be included in risk assessment models. These patients should be considered a high risk for perioperative morbidity and mortality. Patients with COVID-19 symptoms on presentation should have surgery deferred until symptoms improve or resolve and should be reassessed for surgical treatment versus definitive nonoperative treatment with palliative care and/or hospice care.
Level of evidence: Prognostic Level III. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of Levels of Evidence.