The Widening Gap in Dementia Care and One Woman ’s Crusade to Address it

According to Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI), someone in the world develops dementia every 3 seconds. An estimated 50 million people had dementia in 2017. That number is expected to grow to 75 million people by 2030. In 2017, Dr. Anitha Rao, a board certified geriatric neurologist and CEO of neurocern, published a paper that highlighted the uneven distribution of trained dementia specialists in the United States. Her paper pointed to 20 States that were “Dementia Deserts” where there was insufficient access to specialists given the number of Dementia patients. Without intervention, this gap in Dementia care will only get wider. While practicing at UCSF’s renowned Memory & Aging Center, Rao noticed two alarming trends: The time between booking an appointment and the actual appointment continued to grow More and more undiagnosed patients were coming in to the Center ADI estimates that only 20-50% of dementia cases are recognized and documented in primary care. With little training and few resources available to patients, primary care doctors are reticent to tell patients they may have Dementia. Read this excellent, and frightening, article by Alice Park in Time on this topic. An unfortunate consequence of this delay in diagnosis, was that Rao often had the unenviable job of telling patients and their families that the disease had progressed beyond the early-stage interventions that might have made a difference. Worse, she found that many patients were taki...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Patients AHIP Alzheimer's Dementia neurocern Source Type: blogs