Optimizing Alzheimer’s Disease Care

Key takeaways:

• Early identification and intervention play a crucial role in helping change the progression of neurodegenerative diseases and can create opportunities for improved quality of life.
• Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) poses challenges for clinicians, caregivers and patients around timely diagnosis and care coordination.
• PINC AI^™ Applied Sciences’ (PAS) Brain Memory Collaborative brings health systems and life sciences together to uncover and help solve clinical, operational and financial barriers to early identification, diagnosis and treatment.

As part of a two-part blog series on optimizing neurodegenerative disease care, the PINC AI^™ Applied Sciences’ (PAS) team is sharing insights discussed during an Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) breakout session at the PAS Brain and Memory Collaborative (BMC) meeting held on April 25, 2023.

Topics at the meeting included discussions around barriers impeding optimization of care pathways, adoption of guidelines, exploring the data needs to drive policy and innovation in reimbursement, and lack of access to care.

Breakout Session Key Learnings

Participants all agreed that an early diagnosis of AD can offer the opportunity for early intervention including implementing a coordinated care plan and better management of AD symptoms.

During the AD breakout session, participants discussed several topic areas where improvements could support efforts to measure preventable harm; understand the impact on mortality, morbidity and cost; and to help drive change and impact patient care.

A few of the focus areas included:

• Connected Data - Better standardized and connected real-world data that can generate actionable real-world evidence is needed to drive change in the way providers create AD care pathways, issue care guidance, provide patient care and support advocacy for policy changes.

• Improved Coding - To catch AD signs and symptoms early, such as mild cognitive impairment, providers need to get better at coding, documenting patient conditions or capturing details in their notes like patient wandering or when patients or caregivers indicate behavioral disturbances. The earlier AD is diagnosed, the better chances of patients receiving interventions that could impact or slow disease progression.

• Advocacy for Change - Participants discussed the need to assess current AD information, treatment options, increased aging population and an uptick in AD diagnoses to advocate for changes in Medicare and policies that can affect AD patients from a potential national coverage determination (NCD) to better engage specialists in accountable care organizations (ACOs). Participants also cited the potential for an AD high profile advocate who, like Michael J. Fox for Parkinson’s Disease, could bring increased awareness to AD and who could support and advocate for the potential development of better diagnostics and help accelerate the search for AD treatments.

Why it Matters

AD and dementia can cause significant strain on people with the disease, their families and caregivers, but also the healthcare system. The prevalence of AD is increasing as well as the economic burden with the total healthcare costs for the treatment of AD in 2020 estimated at $305 billion, and expected to increase to more than $1 trillion as the population ages. With these cost estimates, there is an urgent need to identify approaches that could help prevent or delay the onset of AD and subsequent dementia.

Patients with AD or dementia could benefit from early diagnosis and some interventions like a healthy diet, physical and cognitive exercises that can help slow the progression of AD.

Robust data, improved medical coding, and better advocacy for AD patients and their caregivers can help improve the management of AD and support research efforts aimed at developing disease-modifying treatments and medications designed to slow cognitive decline.

Collaboration Can Help Optimize Patient Care

The PAS BMC is committed to collaborating with partners to generate real-world insights and co-innovate new, clinical pathways that remove barriers impacting patient outcomes. Early identification of patients with AD can help clinicians provide treatment to help slow the progression of the disease.

Recently, PAS worked with healthcare professionals to create a System Care Pathway for AD that health systems can utilize to better assess, diagnose and optimize care for patients at risk for an AD diagnosis.

To create the pathway, PAS utilized tech-enabled artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of natural language processing (NLP) and a data ontology designed to mine the unstructured narrative of clinicians’ notes and pathology reports for statements like “Mom seems a bit agitated” or “Mom is confused.” PAS searched 20 million documents to identify more than 600,000 patients that had AD, dementia or mild cognitive impairment. PAS then created a risk model based on commonalities they found in the PHD data, conducted research and held discussions with health professionals to help build the System Care Pathway to optimize care for AD patients.

The results from the use of this technology could be utilized to inform care guidance and help clinicians identify early signs of AD. In addition, it could help clinicians identify which risk factors and clinical signs and symptoms are most predictive of subsequent disease development.

What the Future Holds

The knowledge that AD starts well before patients display signs and symptoms can help providers understand why AD is hard to prevent and treat. However, it also implies there’s a timeframe where intervention could take place to slow or adjust AD progression.

Improving the AD patient journey will help improve patient care, optimize patient’s healthcare interactions and help provide these patients with a better quality of life.

PAS and our partners are committed to this work and continue to advance research and develop technology-enabled tools to help health systems better prepare and improve their processes for managing and treating these vulnerable patient populations.

For more on this topic:

• Read more about PINC AI^™ Applied Sciences and explore our research and analytics solutions.
• Read our study published in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease.
• For health systems or life sciences companies interested in joining the BMC, please contact us for more information.

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