Implementation of MIND at Home Program in Primary Care for People Living With Dementia: A Pilot Study

Detailed Summary

The number of people living with dementia (PLWD) is growing. PLWD are often cared for at home by an informal caregiver, but this care is often not sufficient, resulting in costly hospitalizations and other unnecessary and avoidable use of health services. In addition, many PLWD are transferred to costly long-term care facilities despite their preference to live at home. One way to improve care for PLWD is to work with their primary care doctors to provide better quality of care at lower costs for their patients. To accomplish this, we propose to collaboratively implement the MIND at Home Dementia Care Coordination Program into primary care clinics. The program expands the skills of existing primary care staff to the level of Memory Care Coordinators (MCCs), who will work with a larger primary care team on combining the benefits of clinic-based services with home-based services that support PLWD, their families, and care partners. Two health care organizations will enroll 150 people in the MIND at Home program for 3 months at a time. The program includes one home visit per month, a comprehensive needs assessment (which assesses medical, nonmedical, social, and environmental issues), the subsequent development and implementation of an individualized care plan, and unlimited contact with the MCC for the PLWD, their family, and care partner. The primary care team, including the MCC, will also have access to weekly virtual sessions focused on dementia and including short lectures and the discussion of specific case examples. Rates of monthly hospitalizations among participants and emergency room (ER) visits and number of medications the PLWD takes every month will be collected from the health care organization. The hypothesis is that the rate of hospitalizations and ER visits will decrease, and the number of medications will also decrease. We hope to positively impact the quality and costs of care associated with caring for PLWD. This pilot seeks to test the feasibility of implementing the MIND at Home program into primary care in a racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse population of PLWD to prepare for a larger study that will determine this program's effectiveness and spread it broadly into primary care clinics across the country. From the perspectives of health systems and overall society, MIND at Home will reduce costs, improve primary care team satisfaction, and preserve the dignity and independence of PLWD by enabling them to age at home.

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