Providing exceptional cognitive care starts with having the tools to assess brain health quickly, accurately, and with ease. Over the past year, we've introduced updates designed to make testing cognitive and behavioral health straightforward, faster, and more precise. These enhancements are focused on saving you time, improving patient engagement, and delivering the insights you need to make data-driven, confident decisions.
In this article, you’ll discover the ways these latest updates can support your practice and help you deliver high-quality cognitive care.
An Enhanced Dementia Protocol: Flexibility and Inclusivity Upgrades
Dementia cases are rising globally, presenting a significant and growing need for quality dementia detection and care. Cognitive testing tools play a critical role in addressing this challenge, empowering providers with the ability to identify cognitive changes early and deliver tailored care that meets the complex needs of individuals with dementia.
The Creyos protocol for dementia assessment was introduced in 2023 to tackle the impending rise of dementia cases. This all-in-one solution supports every step of dementia care—starting with initial screening and multi-domain testing, all the way through to long-term management of cognitive impairment. Already in use by leading senior primary care health systems, it was further improved in 2024 to make it simpler for providers to use and more engaging for patients.
Increased flexibility to fit your process for dementia testing
The Creyos dementia protocol helps providers screen for mild cognitive impairment and assess for dementia including:
- Screening: Quickly and sensitively detects cognitive impairment.
- Assessment: Measures impairment across different parts of the brain to inform a diagnosis as required by the DSM-5.
- Standardized Questionnaires: Includes the Informant Questionnaire on Cognitive Decline (IQ-CODE) to evaluate subjective decline, Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) for functional dependence, and the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and General Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) for mental health conditions to help confirm a diagnosis as required by the DSM-5.
- Tracking: Monitors cognitive changes over time and evaluates the impact of interventions.
- Care Planning: Uses assessment results to inform care for patients with impairment.
This thorough, reliable, and accurate approach to dementia care was further enhanced in 2024 to ensure flexibility and adapt to diverse system workflows. Now, each component can be used independently, allowing providers to tailor the protocol to their needs. Some organizations may use only the screener and assessment while administering questionnaires separately, and others can choose to run their entire protocol through Creyos.
By combining flexibility with comprehensive assessment, primary care providers can more easily detect mild cognitive impairment and diagnose dementia without disrupting their existing workflows—supporting faster decisions and improved patient outcomes.
Simplified tasks to improve patient understanding
When the dementia protocol was first introduced, the Grammatical Reasoning task was used to assess the verbal ability cognitive domain. This task relied on patients’ abilities to read and interpret challenging sentences, often causing difficulties in patients with lower literacy levels.
Based on valuable feedback from providers and its growing use in high-volume and diverse clinical settings, the Grammatical Reasoning task was replaced with Digit Span. While both tasks assess the same cognitive domain, Digit Span uses numbers rather than sentences, making the assessment more accessible to individuals across various literacy levels. This change allows more patients to complete the assessment independently, with minimal provider or medical assistant support, while maintaining the accuracy of the assessment results.
An Updated Patient Experience for Greater Accessibility
Providers care for diverse patients with unique cognitive and physical needs, making accessibility essential for effective cognitive testing. That’s why in 2024, advancing user accessibility was a top priority with updates to better serve all patient groups. From translation into multiple languages to more inclusive task design—these features remove barriers to care and ensure more patients can benefit from cognitive testing.
Multilingual audio-visual guidance
Task tutorials now include visual aids and voiceovers, enhancing understanding for patients with different learning styles and abilities. Both text and audio instructions are available in English, Spanish, and French, with more languages coming soon to expand the range of patients who can be tested.
This more supportive approach ensures more patients can successfully complete testing. Not only does the resulting assessment data provide valuable insights into brain health, but the improved understanding of the testing session also promotes patient engagement and compliance.
Simplified instructions and assessment sessions
Patient completion of assessments is critical to obtaining accurate testing results. To improve completion rates, instructions were rewritten to be clearer and easier to understand. Whether testing low-literacy populations or younger patients, this clear, easy-to-understand language makes the Creyos platform more widely accessible. To further support patients with limited motor, cognitive, or technical abilities, the overall assessment time has been shortened by removing or shortening practice rounds.
These improvements make assessment sessions more understandable and easier to navigate, which helps prevent drop-off, particularly in populations with low literacy or impaired cognitive ability. As a result, patients can move through assessments more quickly, requiring less involvement from providers.
Inclusive task design
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of recommendations designed to make web content more accessible to people with limited visual and auditory abilities. These guidelines also extend to digital health technologies, setting a standard that ensures these tools are usable by a wider range of patients.
The new patient experience incorporates accessibility features throughout its design, aligning with WCAG standards.
- Colors and contrast are optimized for color-blind users.
- Big text and clear fonts support readability for patients with visual impairments.
- Dark task displays accommodate those sensitive to light due to head injury or other causes.
- Larger buttons and user-friendly placement better meet the needs of patients with reduced motor abilities.
- Smaller scoring and timing components lessen testing anxiety and distractions.
These updates focus on instructional and visual improvements, without changing the underlying mechanics of the tasks. Each update has been rigorously scientifically evaluated to ensure that the same outcome measures and validity are maintained, allowing reliable comparisons to previous versions and preserving accuracy in results. By breaking down accessibility barriers, assessments can truly reflect a patient’s cognitive abilities without being skewed by challenges they might face accessing the test.
Greater Automation for More Efficient, Rapid Testing
Streamlined workflows reduce administrative burden, giving providers more time to deliver high-quality care. In 2024, the focus was on making assessments more efficient with improved data access, automated scoring, and quicker administration.
Save hundreds of hours through EHR integration
Integrating the Creyos platform with EHRs makes it easier for organizations to manage assessment workflows and data. Our partnership with Redox facilitates smooth data exchange with dozens of EHR systems. Additionally, we’ve developed custom integrations with athenahealth and AdvancedMD, enabling organizations to automate testing workflows directly within their existing EHR platforms. These integrations offer time savings, seamless automation, and improved data accuracy, reducing administrative burden while improving efficiency.
Faster results, less effort: automated PSQI scoring
Sleep quality is closely linked to mental health disorders and cognitive health. The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index Questionnaire (PSQI) helps providers to better understand a patient’s sleep quality. The questionnaire, when paired with cognitive testing, offers a standardized, validated, and insightful tool to assess sleep disorders and their impact on patients’ cognitive health.
By digitizing the PSQI on the Creyos platform, it can be administered in-clinic or remotely, and sent to patients on an automated schedule. The questionnaire is automatically scored and an easy-to-interpret report is instantaneously generated—saving significant time compared to manual scoring (i.e. pen-and-paper testing) and interpretation. With reduced hands-on effort, providers can maximize their appointment time with patients.
Streamlined administration of digitized questionnaires
On the Creyos platform, all digitized questionnaires are now administered with a user-friendly scrolling display to limit the amount of content per screen and to minimize the number of clicks to move through the questions. This streamlined design reduces distractions, keeping patients engaged and promoting more accurate responses.
Where additional clarification is helpful, pop-up windows provide more information to help the patient understand the question. For example, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) questionnaire includes a pop-up chart explaining the amount of alcohol in standard drinks. This information helps patients to report their alcohol intake more accurately, without cluttering the screen.
Precise, Accessible, and Streamlined Cognitive Care
With these new features introduced to the Creyos platform over the past year, providers are better equipped with the tools to test brain health effectively, inclusively, and with confidence. From enhanced patient accessibility to efficiency gains, these advancements ensure that healthcare organizations can confidently deliver high-quality cognitive and behavioral health assessment. Looking ahead, regular innovations will enhance the Creyos platform, continually supporting providers in delivering data-driven, exceptional care.
