Providing personalized care consultations to patients suffering from dementia helps dramatically drop nursing home admissions while also trimming healthcare spending.
That’s according to a new study by University of California, Los Angeles, researchers, published in December in JAMA Internal Medicine. Investigators tested the use of UCLA’s Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care Program, in which individuals with dementia and their caregivers meet for a 90-minute, in-person assessment to develop a personalized care plan for their treatment.
Based on a study of more than 1,000 Medicare beneficiaries, they found that enrolling in the program reduced their risk of entering a nursing home by 40%. It also saved Medicare about $2,400 per patient annually, compared to those who weren’t enrolled, researchers noted.
“We need to be thinking differently about how we provide care to persons with chronic illnesses, like dementia,” said Lee Jennings, M.D., assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine, who started the project while at UCLA and finished it at OU. “This study shows the benefit of a collaborative care model, where nurse practitioners and physicians work together to provide comprehensive dementia care.”
Personalized care plans aimed to address patients’ medical needs, as well as mental health and social issues that may also impact care. Nurse practitioners then collaborated with individuals’ primary care physicians and specialists to implement the dementia care plan, making adjustments along the way.
Enrollees were followed over a three-year period, and the study compared results to a similar group of patients living in the same ZIP codes who did not participate. Researchers found no differences between the two study groups in hospitalizations, ER visits or hospital readmissions.
