image: Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative
Credit: Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative
The Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative (DAC), a pioneering worldwide initiative seeking to cure Alzheimer’s disease and improve brain health, today announced the launch of its Brain Health Navigator program. The initiative led by the DAC Healthcare System Preparedness (DAC-SP) team will provide resources for patients and providers at six sites across the U.S.
Despite Alzheimer’s status as a growing worldwide epidemic, pathways for accurate diagnosis and evidence based interventions including new therapies are either underdeveloped or non-existent. Every day, over 2,000 patients in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease progress to later ones. The current system requires multiple stakeholders to coordinate in a rapid and efficient manner in order to ensure that candidates who are eligible for disease-modifying therapies receive them during the early window of opportunity when they will most benefit. Even without new therapies, the diagnostic journey for patients and health systems is slow and cumbersome resulting in families not receiving all of the care options, including clinical trial participation, that should be available to them.
To meet this challenge, DAC has developed the Brain Health Navigator program to provide resources and intuitive coordination between patients and providers along the brain-health pathway. The program will support healthcare providers across multiple settings, from frontline patient interactions to diagnosis, and will include educational components on brain health and post-diagnostic care and support.
The six pilot sites will serve as start-up incubators for the development of materials and best practices for the program’s long-term sustainability and expansion, without the need for external funding. Brain Health Navigators will be responsible for multiple clinical and public stakeholders, and their expertise connecting patients with resources at the local level will be valuable across health systems and geographies. The learnings and practical resources from the Brain Health Navigator program will be incorporated into the DAC-SP Early Detection Blueprint.
“The DAC Healthcare System Preparedness team is proud to move forward with this important initiative building on the findings of our initial early detection programs. This effort aims to develop an intuitive set of resources that make care navigation scalable at a national level in the US,” said Tim MacLeod, PhD, DAC Healthcare System Preparedness Director. “Ultimately, our research has shown that navigation support plays a crucial role in making diagnosis more accessible to patients and families by providing resources that enable necessary changes to clinical workflows, making them more feasible and adoptable in real-world care settings.”
The six sites that are part of the program are:
- Dartmouth Health (New Hampshire)
- Memorial Healthcare (Owosso, Michigan)
- Norton Healthcare (Kentucky)
- Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group (California)
- UC Health (Ohio)
- Keck Medical Center of USC, part of Keck Medicine of USC (California)
“Improving the patient pathway is not just a priority but an imperative,” said Tatsuyuki Yasuno, Chariman & CEO, Eisai Inc. “Ensuring timely diagnosis requires collaboration across healthcare systems and public-private partnerships like DAC. Collectively, we can transform the way we approach brain health by creating a more connected, patient-centric care journey.”
Eisai, Inc. is a funder of the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative and provided funding for this program. To learn more about the public, private, and philanthropic support that make this project and other DAC programming possible, please visit davosalzheimerscollaborative.org.
About the DAC Healthcare System Preparedness Program
The Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative Healthcare System Preparedness (DAC-SP) Program addresses the readiness of our healthcare systems worldwide for a global aging population, with an initial focus on improving rates of early detection and the timely and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. DAC-SP applies implementation science methods to turn research breakthroughs into lasting improvements in clinical practice. To accelerate and scale the delivery of cutting-edge treatments and innovations globally, DAC-SP shares learnings and best practices through Learning Laboratory meetings and its Early Detection Blueprint. In collaboration with our partners around the world, DAC-SP serves as a catalyst for transformative improvement within healthcare systems.
About the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative
The Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative (DAC) is a pioneering worldwide initiative to cure Alzheimer’s disease and improve brain health, seeking to mirror the success of global efforts against infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Covid, and Malaria. DAC is extending global research beyond its current focus
on traditional Western European ethnic populations into the highly diversified populations of the Global South, where the vast majority of those with Alzheimer’s live. By introducing lower-cost screening and diagnostic tools as well as new treatment and prevention modalities in primary care and community health settings, DAC is driving implementation of health system solutions that are appropriate for worldwide application. DAC also promotes the vital importance of brain health throughout the lifespan by addressing cardiometabolic and lifestyle factors, especially in early and mid-life. Absent effective action at scale around the world, by 2050, more than 150 million families and half a billion people will be personally impacted by dementia, creating a social, financial, economic, and global security disaster of historic proportions. DAC was launched in Davos in 2021 by the World Economic Forum and the Global CEO Initiative on Alzheimer's Disease. For more information, please visit: davosalzheimerscollaborative.org.
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