Understanding Risk Factors of Elderly Inpatient Falls using Contextual Model

The field of Information Systems is about bridging the digital and information divide. Advances in the digital world enable information to be stored and structured in a manner that facilitates effective use of the information for future modelling purposes. Elderly inpatient falls are a common global phenomenon, and an inpatient fall incident can have severe consequences for the patient, caregivers and the healthcare provider. An inpatient fall can result from many causes and its risk can be increased through the combination of these causes. Many risk factors of elderly inpatient falls have been reported in various papers in the literature. However, a logical comprehensive categorisation of all these factors does not currently exist. The objective of this research in progress is to come up with a generic categorisation of the risk factors for elderly inpatient falls alongside the usage of a contextual model to illustrate the inherent interactions amongst these various factors. In addition, we found that the effect of the interaction amongst some risk factors is time dependent which also needs to be incorporated in the contextual model. Such comprehensive categorisation and contextual risk model will help health providers in the process of profiling of an elderly inpatient with respect to his/her fall risk. It is useful to experts in health informatics in formulating models to automate this process.