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Highlights from the 2024 IMPACT Annual Meetings

Posted on by Jeannine Sato

The NIA IMPACT Collaboratory held the 5th annual Business Meeting on April 2, 2024, and hosted the 3rd annual Scientific Conference on embedded Pragmatic Clinical Trials (ePCTs) in dementia care on April 3-4, 2024.

The meetings, held in Bethesda MD and via zoom for virtual attendees, were attended by more than 200 participants.

Annual Business Meeting

Highlights from the event include remarks from Partha Bhattacharyya, PhD, from the National Institute on Aging, a Mission Moment presented by Eric Larson, MD, MPH, a review of IMPACT’s first five years from multiple principal investigators, Vince Mor, PhD and Susan Mitchell, MD, MPH, and presentations from each of IMPACT’s ten cores and teams highlighting their accomplishments, challenges and goals for future work to further build the field.

The meeting began with a land acknowledgment reflection moment from IMPACT Design and Statistics Core leader, Heather Allore, PhD, followed by a welcome address from Vince Mor, PhD. Remarks from the National Institute on Aging were provided by IMPACT program officer, Partha Bhattacharyya, PhD.

The Mission Moment was provided by the distinguished Eric Larson, MD, MPH, a professor at University of Washington, retired executive director of Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute and vice president for research and healthcare innovation at Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington, and former Leader of IMPACT’s Health Care Systems Core  Dr. Larson began by reminding the group about how far the field has come in the last 60 years and called on researchers and healthcare providers to follow the Guiding Principles for Dementia Care, as described in “Meeting the Challenge of Caring for Persons Living with Dementia and Their Care Partners and Caregivers A Way Forward “ released in February 2021 from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. These principles include:

  • person-centeredness
  • promotion of well-being
  • attention to each person’s needs with respect and dignity
  • justice
  • racial, ethnic, sexual, cultural, and linguistic, inclusivity
  • accessibility and affordability

Susan Mitchell, MD MPH revisited the mission of IMPACT and the many accomplishments achieved towards fulling this mission since IMPACT was launched 5 years ago. Presentations from each of the cores and teams followed, each reviewing their initial aims as calls to action and highlighting major contributions, collaborations and ongoing priorities for the field. To commemorate these first five years of growth and accomplishment, Jo Byrne from seeyourwords created a graphical recording of the event and highlights.

Scientific Conference on embedded Pragmatic Clinical Trials (ePCTs)

This year marked IMPACT’s 3rd annual Scientific Conference on embedded Pragmatic Clinical Trials (ePCTs).

The goal of the event is to disseminate knowledge, promote research development, and engage partners to improve the care and health outcomes of people living with dementia (PLWD) and their care partners (CP). The conference provides an interactive forum for participants to present research and discuss emerging insights to improve dementia care.

This year’s conference was open to the public and featured six topic-based moderated sessions with presentations from speakers from the IMPACT community and NIA- funded researchers. Topics discussed included:

  • Palliative Care and Symptom Management
  • METHODS: Advancing the electronic health record platforms to improve outcome ascertainment in ePCTs
  • ePCTs of Deprescribing Interventions in Dementia
  • ePCT of Intervention for Early Detection of Dementia
  • Methods Using the Long-Term Care Data Cooperative for ePCTs in Dementia Care
  • ePCTs in High Need Populations with PLWD

Each session included multiple presentations, followed by thoughtful panel discussions. The Scientific Conference included a poster session featuring ongoing work of 20 early to mid-career investigators selected from a national call for submissions.

View the Annual Conference page for the full agenda, conference session recordings and images from the conference.

IMPACT members share pandemic-era nursing home dementia care findings in JAGS article

Posted on by Jeannine Sato

 IMPACT members Kathleen Unroe, MD, MHA, MS and Health Care Systems Scholar Gail Towsley, PhD, MS, NHA published an article  in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS). The editorial article, Learning from the experience of dementia care for nursing home residents during the pandemic, comments on an article by Gadbois et al, about nursing home care during the COVID pandemic. Unroe and Towsley comment on issues including the need for dementia care specific staff training, the value of telehealth communication, and the particular importance of expanding family roles in nursing home care. The authors describe the creation of the Moving Forward Nursing Home Quality Coalition as a response to pandemic-era policies which prevented family members from visiting nursing home residents to limit COVID transmission

Read the full article.

IMPACT highlighted in NIA 50th anniversary blog post

Posted on by Jeannine Sato

The IMPACT Collaboratory is highlighted in a blog post by Lis Nielsen, director of NIA’s Division of Behavior and Social Research (DBSR), celebrating the National Institute on Aging’s 50th anniversary.

In the blog, Dr. Nielsen reflects on NIA’s developments over its first five decades and looks forward to opportunities ahead. IMPACT is featured as an example of one of the ways NIA is supporting efforts to understand and improve dementia care. Nielsen describes NIA’s work on aging from an interdisciplinary perspective, while exploring its growing research infrastructure using evidence-based tools to support the work.

Read the blog post.

IMPACT Collaboratory announces two new resources to aid in the design of ePCTs

Posted on by Jeannine Sato

Two IMPACT Collaboratory cores have developed new tools to assist in the design of embedded pragmatic trials (ePCTs) for people living with dementia.

The Design and Statistics Core has developed statistical tools and novel methodology to aid in the design and analyses of ePCTs for people living with dementia. These methods, manuscripts, statistical programs, and interactive web applications are now available to help researchers calculate sample sizes, intra-cluster correlations, and power for stepped wedge and cluster randomized trials.

The content can be accessed in IMPACT’s new Statistical Tools web page. The tools will be updated as new statistical resources become available.

The Technical Data Core has generated prevalence estimates of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) for the Medicare population by geographic regions (e.g., state, hospital referral regions) and settings of care (hospitals, emergency departments, skilled nursing facilities). These data include the total number of Medicare beneficiaries, total number of beneficiaries with ADRD, and key demographic characteristics (age, sex, race, dual eligibility). Data from 2020 and 2021 are available for Medicare Advantage and Traditional Medicare populations. The prevalence data are available with consultation to help investigators planning ePCTs for people living with dementia in these settings of care.

Learn more about United States Dementia Prevalence Estimates among Medicare Beneficiaries. Interested investigators may request a consultation with an expert.

 

 

CAPRA Data Brief | health care use patterns among older adults with dementia

Posted on by Jeannine Sato

IMPACT’s Cameron Gettel, MD and Julie Bynum, MD, MPH are among the authors of the CAPRA Data Brief on health care use patterns among older adults with dementia. The brief was developed by the Center to Accelerate Population Research on Alzheimer’s (CAPRA) at the University of Michigan.

Authors demonstrated the use of Medicare claims to examine healthcare use patterns among older adults with ADRD using datasets provided by the Impact Collaboratory. The brief cites the increase in emergency care, hospitalization, and skilled nursing facility admissions for Medicare recipients and an increased need for planning and care for people with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) in the U.S.

Read the brief here.

Karlawish quoted in NY Times article on proposed Alzheimer’s blood test

Posted on by Jeannine Sato

IMPACT member Jason Karlawish, MD, weighs in on a proposed Alzheimer’s diagnosis tool – a simple blood test. An independent Alzheimer’s working group is finalizing its recommendations for diagnosing Alzheimer’s based on the presence of amyloids in a blood test alone, independent of symptoms. Karlawish voices concern that the amyloid blood test is not yet ready for clinical practice.

Read the full article