Creyos attended Becker's 16th Annual Meeting, held April 13-16 in Chicago. Healthcare is evolving quickly. You could feel that from the first session this year. With over 900 speakers and more than 3,500 attendees, the event brought together senior healthcare executives to share peer-tested strategies and practical insights on tackling everything from tighter margins and workforce gaps to AI adoption and the continued shift from sick care to proactive, continuous care.
Dementia Care Has Moved From Discussion to Infrastructure
Given the work we do at Creyos, the session on the future of Alzheimer's disease care was the one I was most interested in. In contrast with previous years, this wasn't an exploratory conversation about whether health systems should invest in cognitive health; instead, people were comparing notes on how to build programs, how to scale them across systems, and how to make the finances work.
Speakers from major health systems described care models for dementia that mirror how those same systems already approach cancer care, and the leaders presenting them were talking about what’s working, not what they hope to try. This meant care navigation, specialist review boards, and defined pathways from screening all the way through intervention.
I also kept hearing digital cognitive assessment come up in conversation after conversation. Health system leaders talked about rolling out digital cognitive testing across their organizations, with goals that include reaching patients well upstream of a clinical visit through patient portals and virtual care workflows. For systems managing millions of lives with a limited specialist workforce, scalable screening tools aren't a nice-to-have, but are the infrastructure that makes early detection programs viable at the system level.
The Workforce Reality Is Driving Adoption
The specialist shortage also came up in many sessions I attended, across dementia care, behavioral health, geriatrics, and primary care. It was noted that advanced practice providers now represent roughly 40% of the clinical workforce, and health systems actively grapple with how to structure care delivery around that.
In cognitive health, that gap is creating real problems. Patient populations are growing, particularly as more people age into Medicare (one presenter noted that roughly 11,000 Americans age into the program every day), but the number of specialists available to assess and manage those patients is not keeping pace.
The programs that have made progress on dementia care are doing so precisely because they’ve found ways to move assessment upstream so the right patients are seen at the right time. They’re giving primary care teams and advanced practice providers the tools to handle initial cognitive screening without routing every patient to a specialist.
The Financial Case Is Maturing
At previous conferences, the ROI conversation around dementia care tended to stay aspirational, focused on the potential savings from early detection, or the theoretical value-based care alignment. This year, leaders were now talking about meeting the clinical need alongside the business need, and I heard them describe programs that are generating revenue and operating sustainably.
Value-based care was another major theme this year, and those conversations kept circling back to risk adjustment accuracy, quality reporting, and the growing urgency around clinical documentation. For anyone in the cognitive assessment space, that list of priorities sounds very familiar. When you can identify and document cognitive impairment earlier, it helps with risk adjustment accuracy, it supports quality reporting, and it keeps conditions from going undetected and driving up costs downstream. That connection between cognitive assessment and VBC performance isn't new, but it was encouraging to hear it discussed as something that's already working rather than something that might work someday.
AI Needs Discipline, and That Benefits Validated Tools
AI conversations were everywhere at Becker’s this year. Last year, there was a lot of excitement about what AI could do, this year, the conversation was more about ‘discipline.’ This was reflected in conversations about how to deploy it responsibly, how to keep human oversight in the loop, and how to avoid what one speaker called an “arms race” that creates complexity without improving outcomes.
The idea that human interaction needs to sit between AI and the patient came up more than once, and some pointed out that AI literacy is assumed across other industries, and healthcare needs to get there too. There was general agreement that the technology works best when it powers rules engines and augments clinical workflows, not when it's making decisions on its own. One major health system shared that they currently have over 250 AI tools deployed, and the emphasis was on governance and responsible use, not speed of adoption.
For scientifically validated digital tools like digital cognitive assessments, that’s a good sign. Health systems aren’t looking for black-box technology to replace clinical judgment. They want tools backed by evidence that make their clinicians’ lives easier without sacrificing consistency across sites, and this came through consistently in how speakers talked about technology adoption across the board.
What This Means for Cognitive Health Strategy
It was clear at Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting that cognitive health is not a niche clinical interest anymore. Many health systems are moving to build out dementia care the same way they’ve built out cancer care and other chronic disease programs, and digital cognitive assessment is a core part of that build.
If the conversations at this year’s conference are any indication, the organizations that invest in cognitive health infrastructure now will be best positioned to detect the undetected with an aging population, as the need continues to grow.
Catriona Galbraith, Strategic Accounts Director in Product & Science
At Creyos, Catriona partners with strategic accounts to maximize the value of their cognitive assessment programs. She brings over a decade of health IT experience, having previously led client success teams managing $13M+ portfolios. She holds a Master's in Technology Management from Georgetown and a BS in Health Sciences from James Madison University.