Pilot program by IU and Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative to test AI-powered cognitive screening at scale

How AI, Dig­i­tal Screen­ing Tools Can Help Flag Ear­ly Cog­ni­tive Decline (Health IT Analytics):

Ear­ly diag­no­sis of Alzheimer’s and oth­er demen­tias remains at the fore­front of efforts to min­i­mize the impact of these neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­eases. But chal­lenges such as increased life expectan­cy and the risks of aging, along with com­plex­i­ties in diag­no­sis and treat­ment result­ing from mixed brain patholo­gies, make ear­ly detec­tion dif­fi­cult … A new pilot pro­gram at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty School of Med­i­cine and Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Health, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Davos Alzheimer’s Col­lab­o­ra­tive (DAC), seeks to tack­le these issues using dig­i­tal screen­ing tools.

… The test itself, the Linus Health Core Cog­ni­tive Eval­u­a­tion, is com­prised of a lifestyle-based ques­tion­naire and a dig­i­tal cog­ni­tive assess­ment, which asks patients to remem­ber three unre­lat­ed words, com­plete the clock draw­ing test, and repeat the three words. The tool then uses arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) to detect sub­tle signs of cog­ni­tive impair­ment and gen­er­ates a score.

“[Using that score,] they get a stop­light that’s green, yel­low, or red. And the doc­tor can take a quick look at it and decide, ‘what do I do with this?’” Brosch (Note: Dr. Jared Brosch, neu­rol­o­gist at IU Health) stat­ed. “‘This per­son­’s a green; they’re good to go. I’ll talk to them about their lifestyle,’ or ‘It’s yel­low; maybe I should refer them to some­one to do a lit­tle bit of a deep­er dive to fig­ure out if there real­ly is an issue here,’ or if it’s red, ‘Maybe I should refer them direct­ly to one of our experts for addi­tion­al test­ing, diag­no­sis, and treatment.’”

He explained that the dig­i­tal tool helps ana­lyze more nuances that may cor­re­late to cog­ni­tive decline that the tra­di­tion­al pen and paper approach can’t show, such as how long it took the patient to draw the clock, the shape of their drawn clock com­pared to a cir­cle, how well their num­bers were placed, and what do their hands looked like while com­plet­ing the test…

“There’s bar­ri­ers around billing codes and things that should be real­ly easy to fix, but they’re not,” Fer­rell (Note: Phyl­lis Fer­rell, direc­tor of the DAC Health­care Sys­tem Pre­pared­ness ini­tia­tive) explained. “[These issues are] about how these tests get reim­bursed and how to make sure that we don’t spend more of a doctor’s time than we need to make sure that these screen­ings get done.”

The pilot project at IU is help­ing to gen­er­ate data that can be pre­sent­ed to the US Depart­ment of Health & Human Ser­vices (HHS) and the Cen­ters for Medicare & Med­ic­aid Ser­vices (CMS) to help devel­op action­able solutions.

News in Context:

• Learn more about the DAC Health­care Sys­tem Pre­pared­ness initiative
• Altoi­da rais­es fur­ther $14 mil­lion to “democ­ra­tize dig­i­tal cog­ni­tive assess­ment at scale” via aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR) and AI
• Geisinger and Eisai to test real-world valid­i­ty of AI-pow­ered Pas­sive Dig­i­tal Mark­er (PDM) in detect­ing ear­ly cog­ni­tive impair­ment and dementia