Dartmouth Health joins Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative’s Brain Health Navigator program, improving care access for Alzheimer’s patients

Dartmouth Health has been appointed as one of six health systems nationally working to improve access to the latest, most effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, and outcomes for patients. The Brain Health Navigator program, formally launched today, is a program of the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative (DAC), a pioneering worldwide initiative seeking to cure Alzheimer’s and improve brain health.

“For generations, Alzheimer’s patients and their families have had little choice but to accept the slow and devastating consequences of this disease,” said Karen E. Blackmon, PhD, a neuropsychologist at Dartmouth Health’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and co-director for the Brain Health Navigator program at Dartmouth Health. “DAC’s new effort to increase access to novel Alzheimer’s therapies, both to patients and the healthcare professionals who treat them, offers hope to the millions impacted by this disease. Dartmouth Health is extraordinarily proud to be part of the Brain Health Navigator program and DAC’s bold vision for a world without Alzheimer’s.”

Despite Alzheimer’s disease’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 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.

Dartmouth Health is part of the DAC Healthcare System Preparedness team, serving as DAC’s base of operations on the East Coast. Other sites include Memorial Healthcare in Michigan, Norton Healthcare in Kentucky, University of Cincinnati Health in Ohio, and Sharp HealthCare and Keck Medicine, both in California.

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.”

To learn more about the Brain Health Navigator program, visit davosalzheimerscollaborative.org.