Upgrade Your Osteoporosis Care with Better Fall Risk Screening
And get patients on board for real-world results
Osteoporosis and osteopenia are serious conditions that affect millions of Americans, with millions more at risk of developing them. Women, in particular, are more vulnerable due to hormonal changes that occur during menopause. Patients with these conditions are at a higher risk of falls, which can lead to fractures and a cascade of adverse outcomes.
There are robust tools available to assess bone density, dietary deficiencies like Vitamin D and calcium, and muscle strength. However, in one key area, the current tools are very poor - assessing the individual’s intrinsic risk of falling. Without an accurate assessment, it is not possible to provide appropriate lifestyle guidance to the patient and physicians have to make do with generalized advice such as regular exercise and diet improvements. It can also risk the patient placing all their faith in medications to slow deterioration rather than having a sense of agency about managing their condition.
A new medical device can help eliminate this gap in your Osteoporosis toolkit. Based on the principle that the human body is constantly correcting against the forces of gravity to stay upright, the Stability scale measures and analyzes the tiny movements made while standing with eyes open to distinguish moments of control and moments of micro failure in dynamic postural control.
This method has shown to identify 2-5 times more people at high risk for falling than the tools you’re currently using [1]. Furthermore, it stratifies patents on a scale of 1-10, and includes clinical decision-making software to personalize care based on the patient’s profile, best practice lifestyle interventions, score comparison to others in their age group, and makes available patient education tools both online and offline.
The patient education tools help your patients focus on six key lifestyle areas, including exercise patterns and sleep, which have a vital impact on balance. Balance responds relatively quickly to intervention, with older adults typically showing a 34-day average for shifting between high-risk and moderate-risk zones [1].
Hip fractures can be extremely challenging to recover from, especially in older patients. It is estimated that 70% of patients with osteoporosis who suffer fractures never return to their pre-fracture status [2]; for those with hip fractures, it can mean constant pain and loss of mobility and independence. This in turn can put them at higher risk of falling again.
This objective tool has been shown to be effective at cutting through patient denial as to their actual risk of falling, allowing physicians to help them make small yet meaningful lifestyle changes to improve their balance and reduce their fall risk. Patients can be retested on subsequent office visits or enrolled in remote patient monitoring for in-home testing if a shorter feedback loop is desirable.
While building backbone density with exercise has been shown to be possible, it takes time to produce measurable differences and the patient could still be at risk for fracture if they fall. Taking simultaneous action to understand their fall risk and help reduce it must therefore be a critical part of good patient care.
Physicians using the Stability scale have reported surprise at the number of their patients whose balance was worse than they had realized before using this measurement:
“They came to see me for something unrelated but I could see from their Stability score that they also needed to be referred to physical therapy for balance. I was really glad I had the scale available for them.”
- primary care physician, Grand Rapids, MI
Effective Osteoporosis care and treatment must include a robust fall-risk assessment and appropriate interventions to improve balance. The ZIBRIO Stability scale is not only a quick assessment, but it’s also extremely powerful in predicting future falls. You wouldn’t guess at your patients’ bone density. Now you don’t have to guess about their fall risk either.
Learn more about implementing ZIBRIO in your practice today or set up a demo with our clinical specialist team.
[1] Forth et al. 2020. A Postural Assessment Utilizing Machine Learning Prospectively Identifies Older Adults at a High Risk of Falling. Front. Med., 7, 926.
[2] American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. (2013). Osteoporosis and bone health in adults as a national public health priority. Retrieved from https://qa.aaos.org/contentassets/1cd7f41417ec4dd4b5c4c48532183b96/1113-osteoporosis-bone-health-in-adults-as-a-national-public-health-priority.pdf