Cognitive care is of increasing importance to an aging US patient population. Nearly 7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, with that number expected to grow to 13 million by 2050. Yet, there’s a significant gap in the detection of mild cognitive impairment and dementia.
One survey found that only 47% of primary care providers regularly test patients 65 years and older. And up to 96% of providers are unaware of the best cognitive assessment tools to use in their practice. Healthcare providers also cite limited time to see patients, administrative burden, and a lack of specialized training as barriers to regularly assessing patients’ cognition. All of these factors contribute to the underdiagnosis of mild cognitive impairment and dementia.
To properly address this growing need while reducing the administrative burden, providers are turning to technology—investing in tools that can help them test patients for cognitive decline earlier.
But not all solutions are created equally. To truly be effective assessment tools need to balance specificity and sensitivity. They need to encourage better completion and patient compliance by being easy to administer and un-intimidating for patients to complete. And they need to not stop at just assessment, but offer providers a way to deliver complete cognitive care with care planning tools.
With a new protocol, Creyos is paving the way for earlier detection of mild cognitive impairment and dementia so healthcare providers can expand their capabilities, intervene more effectively, and improve patients’ quality of life. Introducing the Creyos dementia screen and cognitive care plan.
Read on to learn about these new capabilities, the science behind the solution, and the practical benefits for healthcare professionals.
The dementia protocol gives every healthcare provider an end-to-end solution for providing high-quality cognitive care.
With this toolkit, primary care physicians and neurologists get access to:
Together, these resources enable healthcare providers to effectively detect, test, manage, and track cognitive function :
The science behind Creyos comes from over 30 years of research and a total normative database of over 85,000 participants. The cognitive screen draws from data on over 22,000 healthy individuals and 6,000 neurological patients.
Addressing the need for physicians to have a fast yet comprehensive way to detect cognitive impairment, an in-house team of Creyos scientists identified two online cognitive tasks from the established Creyos task library that result in effective, sensitive, and specific detection of mild cognitive impairment—with an 82% accuracy rate.
Early detection of cognitive impairment and dementia is critical for improving patients’ quality of life. Yet capture rates for these conditions are low using traditional tools such as the MiniCog, MoCA, and SLUMS, which lack the sensitivity to detect early stages of the condition. The Creyos cognitive screen closes this gap by having greater sensitivity—a 32% capture rate of impairment (compared to 1% by the MMSE).
The Creyos cognitive care plan is also aligned to Alzheimer’s Association standards. While there are many potential resources available for cognitive care planning, Creyos streamlines the process for physicians. The pre-packaged care plan saves time by eliminating the need to compile multiple critical documents. Plus, the report can be dynamically updated over time and automatically uploaded to patient records, to reduce administrative time.
Overall, the dementia protocol and care plan requires no additional hardware or training, can be completed at home or in a clinic, and offers a patient-friendly experience designed to improve accessibility and completion rates.
Creyos approach to dementia screening, testing, and care planning is designed to help physicians close the gap in dementia detection and cognitive care planning.
Below we’ll provide an overview of the benefits for primary care providers, neurologists, and other healthcare professionals.
Primary care providers are expected to deliver complete patient care—and that includes handling brain health. In fact, under Medicare Advantage an annual wellness visit requires cognitive assessment. However, many physicians are limited by time, lack of specialized training, or administrative burden to do this efficiently.
The benefits of Creyos for primary care providers include:
As specialists in brain health, neurologists often see patients with known cognitive impairments, once the condition has already progressed to a point of impacting daily life. Other screening tools only scratch the surface, and don’t provide a depth of data that could be valuable in developing more effective care plans.
In addition, a typical workflow requires time-consuming administration. A complete neuropsychological test can take several hours to administer, compile, and interpret for a patient.
The benefits of Creyos for neurologists include:
The Creyos dementia protocol and care plan is a result of close collaboration with healthcare providers—developed with their input. With increased importance being placed on dementia capture, and a growing population impacted by this disease, this protocol equips physicians with the tools needed to successfully detect and manage cognitive decline.
The new end-to-end screening, testing, and care planning capabilities come standard as part of every Creyos online subscription.