Doctors, Researchers Call For Improving Care Coordination To Expand Dementia Care Access 

In the last two years, two drugs have been federally approved to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages, but in order to effectively integrate these treatments into the health care system, health care systems must establish collaborative care models.

To do that, the Journal of the American Medial Association’s neurology division is calling on increasing care navigation services to increase the impact dementia diagnostics and treatments have across health care-related industries.

Jeffrey Burns, MD, who is the co-director of the University of Kansas Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, co-authored an editorial calling on health care organizations to create interdisciplinary teams to extend the reach of what he and co-authors termed the country’s “limited dementia specialty workforce.”

In a joint statement, Burns, along with Katherine Possin at the Global Brain Health Institute University of California San Francisco and Dr. Brent Forester at the Tufts University School of Medicine, wrote that dementia specialists often use care navigators as the primary point of contact with families of loved ones living with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

“We’ll be looking at the risk factors and detecting risk from new blood tests and then doing something about it to reduce risk or indefinitely delay the onset of memory problems,” he said. “That’s the new era we’re entering, and we need to be thinking about, how do we do this? How do we move as quickly as we can into this new era, and scale these new interventions to the population? It’s going to require a lot of new thinking, new models and teamwork.”

The article highlights the recent rollout and expansion of the Guiding and Improved Dementia Experience (GUIDE) model that could improve collaborative models to improve dementia care access. The JAMA Neurology team notes that collaborative care benefits not only patients who are able to participate in new dementia therapies but also those who are not eligible by providing coordinated medical and social support services.

“Alzheimer’s is a complex disease. The brain is complex. It requires understanding what types of things are causing someone’s dementia. It’s not as simple as amyloid,” Burns said. “We know when we see somebody with Alzheimer’s disease, if we see the changes of Alzheimer’s in the brain, more often than not, we see vascular issues, we see inflammatory issues, we see metabolic issues. And so it requires a personalized approach, but also a multidisciplinary approach.”

The researchers and medical professionals who authored the editorial noted that new care models were crucial in ensuring new tests and dementia treatment options are made more accessible.

“If we divert limited resources to the concierge treatment of patients receiving DMTs (disease-modifying treatments) without simultaneously addressing care reform, we will exacerbate well-established health disparities in access to dementia services,” they wrote.

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