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Linus Health Introduces Person-Centered Approach to Establish Clinically Meaningful Benefits and Personalized Brain Health CareScalable, systematic and automated process captures and monitors metrics based on patients' treatment priorities for managing Alzheimer's disease and related dementias BOSTON, June 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Clinical and research leaders from Linus Health, a digital health company enabling early detection of Alzheimer's and other dementias, recently co-authored a peer-reviewed paper. The article describes a technology-enabled, scalable approach to guide clinical decisions and outcome evaluations about brain health that effectively incorporate patients' treatment priorities.
The perspective paper, "Towards a lifelong personalized brain health program: empowering individuals to define, pursue, and monitor meaningful outcomes," was published on June 4 in Frontiers in Neurology. Linus Health authors include lead author Stina Saunders, PhD, who leads Linus' personalized medicine efforts, as well as Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, chief medical officer and co-founder, and John Showalter, MD, chief strategy officer. "While patients may have the same neurodegeerative disease, the aspects of life that are personally meaningful and become priorities for treatment can be quite different across diverse patient backgrounds and values," Saunders said. "As researchers and clinicians, we need to ensure that our interventions achieve clinically meaningful benefits on an individual level. Our paper describes why and how to use an evidence-based, technology-enabled tool to efficiently incorporate patients' input and both monitor and support outcomes that truly matter to them in the long term." Historically, care across the spectrum of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to dementia has lacked a widely adopted, systematized approach for integrating metrics related to clinically meaningful benefits on an individual level, the paper's authors wrote. For example, a patient's ability to play golf, manage finances, drive a car, write to their friends and family, and other activities varies in importance between patients, but has not been consistently included and evaluated as outcomes during clinical trials or care delivery. In addition, while numerous standardized questionnaires have been developed over the years for gathering well-being information from patients, many face adoption obstacles such as being paper-based, time-consuming, or too broad to capture unique desired outcomes specific to patients. As such, authors introduce the electronic Person Specific Outcome Measure (ePSOM) as an example in this area. Conceived at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, ePSOM is now licensed to and developed by Linus Health and can efficiently incorporate unique input from patients and care partners to quantify the severity of the disability based on patients' reported confidence in their ability to perform their desired activities. The reported assistance of care partners in helping with these activities can also support researchers and clinicians in evaluating treatment efficacy. Such a tool can be administered online through a mobile device at home to maximize efficiency for researchers and clinicians and to improve the experience for patient-care partner dyads. Once captured, patient priorities can be easily monitored throughout the duration of a clinical trial or followed longitudinally in clinical settings. In a healthcare delivery environment, patient and caregiver input can be combined with other brain health factors and lifestyle questions to generate a personalized Brain Health Action Plan, a patient education tool that highlights areas of attention and actionable lifestyle and health interventions to support better brain health. "Linus Health's digital cognitive assessment platform can be scaled to support the management of thousands of patients across a health system or to enable large, multi-centered studies. However, our ultimate focus is to empower each individual to define their personal brain health priorities and support them to achieve them," Pascual-Leone said. "Our paper in Frontiers in Neurology lays out the practical and feasible approach we use to define, monitor and protect, in healthcare and clinical research, those hugely important patient-centered brain health priorities that need to be our compass throughout the patient and care partner journey." Contact Linus Health at [email protected] to learn more about this tech-enabled approach to capture clinically meaningful benefits to advance both clinical care and research activities in brain health. About Linus Health Media Contact
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