Scalable, systematic and automated process captures and monitors metrics based on patient treatment priorities for managing Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias
BOSTON, June 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ – Clinical and research leaders from Linus Health, a digital health company that enables early detection of Alzheimer’s and other dementias, recently co-authored a peer-reviewed paper. The article describes a technology-enabled, scalable approach to guide clinical decisions and outcome assessments about brain health that effectively incorporate patients’ treatment priorities.
The perspective paper,”Toward a Lifelong Personalized Brain Health Program: Empowering Individuals to Define, Pursue, and Monitor Meaningful Outcomes“, was published on June 4 in Frontiers in Neurology. Linus Health authors include lead authors Stina SaundersPhD, who leads Linus’ personalized medicine efforts, as well Alvaro Pascual-LeoneMD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder, and John ShowalterMD, chief strategy officer.
“While patients may have the same neurodegenerative disease, the aspects of life that are personally meaningful and become priorities for treatment may be very different across different patient backgrounds and values,” Saunders said. “As researchers and clinicians, we must ensure that our interventions achieve clinically meaningful benefits at an individual level. Our paper describes why and how to use an evidence-based, technology-enabled tool to efficiently integrate patient input and both monitor and support results that really matter to them in the long run.”
Historically, care across the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to dementia spectrum has lacked a widely adopted, systematized approach to integrating metrics related to clinically meaningful benefits at an individual level, the paper’s authors wrote. For example, a patient’s ability to play golf, manage finances, drive a car, write to their friends and family, and other activities varies in importance between patients, but is not consistently recorded and evaluated as outcomes during clinical trials. or care delivery.
Additionally, while many standardized questionnaires have been developed over the years for collecting patient well-being information, many have barriers to adoption, such as being paper-based, time-consuming, or too broad to capture unique patient-specific desired outcomes.
As such, authors introduce the electronic Person Specific Outcome Measure (ePSOM) as an example in this area. Conceived by the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, ePSOM is now licensed to and developed by Linus Health and can efficiently incorporate unique input from patients and care partners to quantify disability severity based on patients’ reported confidence in their ability to perform their desired activities. The reported assistance of care partners in assisting with these activities may also support researchers and clinicians in evaluating the effectiveness of treatment.
Such a tool can be administered online via a mobile device at home to maximize efficiency for researchers and clinicians and to improve the experience for patient care partner dyads. Once established, patient priorities can be easily monitored over the course of a clinical trial or followed longitudinally in clinical settings. In a healthcare delivery environment, patient and caregiver input can be combined with other brain health factors and lifestyle questions to generate a personalized Brain Health Action Plan, a patient education tool that highlights areas of focus and actionable lifestyle and health interventions to improve brain health to support.
“Linus Health’s digital cognitive assessment platform can be scaled to support the management of thousands of patients in a health system or to enable large, multi-center studies. However, our ultimate focus is to empower each individual to set their personal brain priorities define health and support them to achieve them,” said Pascual-Leone. “In our paper Frontiers in Neurology describes the practical and feasible approaches we use to define, monitor and protect, in healthcare and clinical research, those hugely important patient-centred priorities for brain health that should be our compass throughout the journey of patients and care partners.”
Contact Linus Health by (email protected) to learn more about this technology-enabled approach to capture clinically meaningful benefits to advance both clinical care and research activities in brain health.
About Linus Health
Linus Health is a Boston-based digital health company focused on transforming brain health for people around the world. By advancing how we detect and address cognitive and brain disorders – leveraging cutting-edge neuroscience, clinical expertise and artificial intelligence – our goal is to enable a future where people can live longer, happier and healthier lives with better brain health . Linus Health’s digital cognitive assessment platform provides a proven, practical means to enable early detection; empowers providers with actionable clinical insights; and supports individuals with personalized action plans. We are proud to partner with leading healthcare delivery organizations, research institutes and life sciences companies to accelerate more proactive intervention and personalized care in brain health. To learn more about our practical solutions for proactive brain health®to try www.linushealth.com or follow us LinkedIn.
Media contact
Tara Stultz (Amendola for Linus Health)
440-225-9595
(email protected)
SOURCE Linus Health