The efforts of the NIA IMPACT Collaoratory to enhance embedded pragmatic clinical trials (ePCTs) in people living with dementia was included in a recent JAMA viewpoint, “Expanding Evidence for Clinical Care of Older Adults Beyond Clinical Trial Traditions and Finding New Approaches.”

Authors Michael Steinman, MD, Cynthia M. Boyd, MD, MPH, and Kenneth E. Schmader, MD, explore alternative approaches to delivering evidence needed to inform care for older adults in the viewpoint piece. In addition to ePCTs, they discuss strategies for analyzing existing clinical trial data and observational evidence to extrapolate them to populations of interest.

In the viewpoint, they state that the IMPACT Collaboratory “…is facilitating development of a number of pragmatic trials embedded in health systems that address different aspects of care for older adults with dementia. Because such trials typically forgo dedicated research visits, measuring aspects of geriatric health status can be challenging. Nonetheless, creative strategies can be used to measure these important domains, such as brief telephone-based assessments of function and cognition, extraction of functional status data from Medicare annual health risk assessment forms, and use of existing data to construct frailty index models.”

Read the full article here.