OptumHealth

Dr. Gregory Bayer on Adding Brain to Behavioral Healthcare

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Dr. Bay­er will dis­cuss Adding Brain to Behav­ioral Health­care, as part of the ses­sion Where will neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty-based inter­ven­tions be accessed, and how will they be reg­u­lated and paid for? at the upcom­ing 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tu­al Sum­mit (June 7–14th, 2012).

Gre­go­ry Bay­er, new CEO of Brain Resource’s US oper­a­tions, served most recent­ly as the Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer of OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solu­tions, a divi­sion of Unit­ed­Health Group [Read more…] about Dr. Gre­go­ry Bay­er on Adding Brain to Behav­ioral Healthcare

5 Quotes on Neuroplasticity-Based Healthcare and Innovation for an Aging Society

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marian_diamondMar­i­an Dia­mond, UC-Berke­ley: “Peo­ple fre­quent­ly do the same lev­el of cross­word puz­zles to stim­u­late their brains year after year. They do not chal­lenge their brains with more dif­fi­cult lev­els of puz­zles. In our research, we showed that if we chal­lenged the rats to reach their food cups by hav­ing to climb over many obstruc­tions, their brains increased more than those of rats who could walk unhin­dered to their food cups. Chal­lenge increased brain size.”

tom_pic.thumbnailTom War­den, All­state: “… we see the oppor­tu­ni­ty that cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­vides as just the next evo­lu­tion of things that we can advo­cate and get behind that ulti­mate­ly make for a bet­ter dri­ving expe­ri­ence, a safer dri­ving expe­ri­ence for peo­ple. Not only for our insureds, but to help the roads be safer for everyone…what we did is to attempt to repli­cate the results that were observed in the lab­o­ra­to­ry envi­ron­ment where old­er dri­vers who have com­plet­ed a good amount of train­ing, 10 hours or more of train­ing, had shown that the risk of crash could be reduced by up to about 50%.”

whitehouse_large-150x150David White­house, OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solu­tions: “Man­aged care has not always been on the fore­front of inno­va­tion and it has been, for us, a chal­lenge and an excite­ment to think about how best to incor­po­rate the lat­est find­ings in neu­ro­science. If I was to give you the major areas that we think are impor­tant, one is the impor­tance of neu­ro­science capa­bilit­ties to improve triage, the sec­ond is the impor­tance that this has on increas­ing access to much bet­ter func­tion­al assess­ments and its rela­tion­ship to safe­ty. The third is in the area of clin­i­cal deci­sion sup­port and the fourth is in brain health. First and fore­most, why is it that in every oth­er organ we have objec­tive data of the organ itself doing its work under var­i­ous loads to help us when we need to make deci­sions about its health and dis­ease state and how best to sup­port it and intervene.”

meet_bill_DrWilliamEReichman_-150x150William Reich­man, Bay­crest: “…we must do for brain health in the 21st cen­tu­ry what we large­ly accom­plished in car­dio­vas­cu­lar health in the past century…that includes an increased focus not only on ter­tiary pre­ven­tion, but on pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary prevention…approximately a year and a half ago the Ontario gov­ern­ment made a deci­sion to invest $10 mil­lion in Canada’s first cen­tre for brain fit­ness to be housed at Bay­crest at the Rot­man Research Institute.…Here in Cana­da I think that we’ve been able to make a com­pelling case main­tain­ing good brain fit­ness needs to be a nation­al pri­or­i­ty for this coun­try and we have been engaged in dis­cus­sions with the gov­ern­ment, both fed­er­al­ly and provin­cial­ly, that brain health pro­grams real­ly need to begin in childhood.”

murali-150x150P Murali Doraiswamy, Duke Uni­ver­si­ty: “… you don’t want to walk into a gro­cery store or into a gas sta­tion and see a brain game claim­ing that they’re a neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty brain game or a bot­tle of water that’s claim­ing it’s a cog­ni­tive reserve enhancer because then I think you’re going to destroy the whole field key…So I think it’s essen­tial for acad­e­mia, for indus­try, for think tanks, for even the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment agen­cies such as per­haps Eng­land, US, Cana­da, to come togeth­er and form a set of guide­lines that can real­ly guide the prop­er devel­op­ment of a lot of these prod­ucts and by prod­ucts I’m talk­ing about two types of prod­ucts. One is cog­ni­tive screen­ing instru­ments and the sec­ond is inter­ven­tion prod­ucts to either improve sort of nor­mal func­tion­ing or to increase resilience to stress or three, to pre­vent disease.”

(answer­ing to audi­ence ques­tion, “when do you believe that cog­ni­tive screen­ing may become a pret­ty rou­tine part of stan­dard med­ical care”) “I think it’s long overdue…the brain is the most impor­tant organ.”

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In Jan­u­ary of 2010 Sharp­Brains pro­duced the inau­gur­al vir­tu­al, glob­al Sharp­Brains Sum­mit on Tech­nol­o­gy for Cog­ni­tive Health and Per­for­mance (Jan­u­ary 18–20th, 2010). The Sum­mit fea­tured a dream team of over 40 speak­ers who are lead­ers in indus­try and research to dis­cuss emerg­ing research, tools and best prac­tices for cog­ni­tive health and per­for­mance, and gath­ered over 250 par­tic­i­pants in 16 countries.

Are you inter­est­ed in what over 40 lead­ing sci­en­tists, clin­i­cians, exec­u­tives and tech­nol­o­gists have to say about the lat­est Tech­nol­o­gy for Cog­ni­tive Health and Per­for­mance? Want to hear how they respond­ed to more than 200 audi­ence ques­tions? You can Learn more Here (full tran­scripts are now avail­able). Sharp­Brains read­ers can get a 15% dis­count [Read more…] about 5 Quotes on Neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty-Based Health­care and Inno­va­tion for an Aging Society

United BioSource Corporation Announces Acquisition of Cognitive Drug Research (computerized cognitive testing)

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Press release: “Leader in cog­ni­tion mea­sure­ment inte­grates into UBC to max­i­mize mea­sure­ment pre­ci­sion of piv­otal end­points and ensure data integri­ty. Unit­ed BioSource Cor­po­ra­tion (UBC) today announced the acqui­si­tion of CDR”

Press release (09/10/09): Here

Analy­sis for mem­bers of Sharp­Brains Net­work for Brain Fit­ness Inno­va­tion: Here

For con­text, see our pre­vi­ous arti­cle titled Com­put­er­ized Cog­ni­tive Assess­ments: oppor­tu­ni­ties and con­cerns, focused on the OptumHealth — Brain­Re­source part­ner­ship and inno­v­a­tive work by the US Army.

Update: Preparing Society for the Cognitive Age, and Industry Webinar

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Here you have the August edi­tion of our month­ly newslet­ter cov­er­ing cog­ni­tive health and Brain Fitnessbrain fit­ness top­ics. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, using the box at the top of this page.

Sci­en­tif­ic pub­li­ca­tion Fron­tiers in Neu­ro­science recent­ly pub­lished a spe­cial issue on Aug­ment­ing Cog­ni­tion, and invit­ed me to con­tribute with an arti­cle titled Prepar­ing Soci­ety for the Cog­ni­tive Age. Ground­break­ing brain research has occurred over the last 20 years. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to improve brain health and per­for­mance is immense, but we need to ensure the mar­ket­place matures in a ratio­nal and sus­tain­able man­ner, both through health­care and non-health­care chan­nels. Click Here to read my article.

Announce­ments

In May 2009 Sharp­Brains pub­lished The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2009, the main indus­try report for lead­ing orga­ni­za­tions prepar­ing their mem­bers, their clients, and their patients for the cog­ni­tive age. 150-pages long, the report includes a mar­ket sur­vey with 2,000+ respon­dents, detailed analy­sis of 20+ ven­dors, research briefs writ­ten by 12 lead­ing sci­en­tists and data and trends for 4 major cus­tomer segments.webinar

Below we share the full Exec­u­tive Sum­ma­ry of the report and announce an exclu­sive webi­nar on Sep­tem­ber 29th to dis­cuss the State of the Mar­ket in more depth with buy­ers of the report.

To order the report and access both the report and the webi­nar, you can click Here. (Only $975 ‑a 25% dis­count- using Dis­count Code Frontiers2009 before Sep­tem­ber 28th).

State of the Market

The brain fit­ness field holds excit­ing promise for the future while pre­sent­ing clear oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges today. The good news is that there are more tools avail­able than ever before to assess and train a vari­ety of cog­ni­tive skills. The bad news is that there are no mag­ic pills and that con­sumers, while sat­is­fied over­all, seem con­fused by com­pet­ing claims on how to reduce one’s “brain age.” We do see signs that this ear­ly-stage mar­ket can mature in a more ratio­nal, struc­tured man­ner; but there is much work to be done. We esti­mate that the size of the U.S. brain fit­ness soft­ware (i.e., appli­ca­tions designed to assess or enhance cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties) mar­ket in 2008 was [Read more…] about Update: Prepar­ing Soci­ety for the Cog­ni­tive Age, and Indus­try Webinar

Brain Teasers on Brain Training/ Games for Health Conference

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Giv­en the whole dis­tract­ing “con­tro­ver­sy” of whether Nin­ten­do Brain Age “works” or not, I have start­ed to use the fol­low­ing “brain teasers” in my talks in order to help the audi­ence gain a more use­ful per­spec­tive of what is going on. They worked great both in the Medicare Read­mis­sions Sum­mit in DC a few weeks ago, and at the Games for Heath Con­fer­ence last week.

Q: How many sol­diers in the US Army have gone through com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive test­ing before being deployed, and why?
A: Over 150,000, in order to estab­lish an objec­tive start­ing base­line and iden­ti­fy poten­tial Post Trau­mat­ic Stress Dis­or­der (PTSD) and Trau­mat­ic Brain Injury (TBI) prob­lems upon their return.

Q: How big is the ongo­ing invest­ment by OptumHealth, a divi­sion of Unit­ed­Health Group (UNH), in devel­op­ing com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive assess­ments to inform clin­i­cal decision-making?
A: over $6m.

Q: How many All­state pol­i­cy-hold­ers over the age of 50 have received a com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­gram to improve their dri­ving safety?
A: Over 8,000, in the state of Pennsylvania.

Q: How many res­i­den­tial com­mu­ni­ties are offer­ing com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­grams to their residents?
A: Over 700, in the US alone, cov­er­ing inde­pen­dent and assist­ed living.

Q: How much mon­ey has the Gov­ern­ment of Ontario invest­ed in set­ting up a new Cen­tre for Brain Fit­ness as part of Bay­crest research cen­ter in order to devel­op and com­mer­cial­ize tech­nolo­gies to assess and enhance cog­ni­tive functions?
A: $10m, matched with anoth­er 10m from local investors.

For more on our Cog­ni­tive Health Track at Games for Health Con­fer­ence last week, see this USA Today article:

More doc­tor’s pre­scrip­tions may include brain games to improve men­tal acuity

(pret­ty good over­all, but please note that Sharp­Brains did­n’t orga­nize the whole con­fer­ence, “only” the cog­ni­tive health track, which was a lot of stim­u­lat­ing fun. Ben Sawyer and team did over­all conference).

Corporate Wellness Programs start to include Brain Health

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Brain-fit­ness games join work­place, as well as senior cen­ter, arse­nals (Mar­ket­Watch)

- “Con­sumers and retire­ment homes have made brain-fit­ness games and exer­cis­es a com­mer­cial hit, but now some insur­ers and employ­ers are incor­po­rat­ing them into well­ness pro­grams that pro­mote health not just for the body but also for the mind.”

- “Improv­ing brain health can result in less pre­sen­teeism, the ten­den­cy to be at work but be dis­tract­ed and not able to focus,” he added. “If you look at dis­abil­i­ty costs, absen­teeism and pre­sen­teeism account for most of the med­ical costs, and that’s a good rea­son for employ­ers to be focused on brain health.” (accord­ing to Dr. Eugene Bak­er, vice pres­i­dent at OptumHealth’s Behav­ioral Solu­tions division)”

The arti­cle reviews inno­v­a­tive prac­tices at OptumHealth, Nation­wide Auto Insur­ance Com­pa­ny, Humana, Penn Treaty Amer­i­can Corp, All­state, and the US Army. I am glad to see the media start to notice the impor­tance of cog­ni­tive assess­ments and the grow­ing activ­i­ty by insur­ers. [Read more…] about Cor­po­rate Well­ness Pro­grams start to include Brain Health