Greg A. Sachs, M.D., explains how a dramatic decrease in hospital visits benefits both dementia patients and health systems.
Transcript:
We think that IN-PEACE having such a dramatic effect on hospitalizations and emergency room visits are an important addition to the literature and to our field because those are outcomes that really haven’t been achieved in prior studies.
Obviously, we’re disappointed that we didn’t move symptoms down for the people in our dementia/palliative care group, but other studies have had similar sorts of benefits on symptoms without ever affecting the emergency room and hospitalization events.
And we think that making such a dramatic and statistically significant impact was important both for the patients, because patients with dementia typically don’t do well in a hospital — they can have complications like delirium, they can lose function, and it’s a very distressing sort of event for them.
But from the healthcare policy and health system standpoint, cutting utilization in half is a potential for dramatic savings in cost, and we think while it wasn’t a goal of our study, the kinds of reductions in emergency room and hospital visits would generate cost savings that would far exceed the cost of actually doing a program like IN-PEACE.
Dr. Sachs says Black individuals have been historically underrepresented in dementia studies, but Regenstrief has built decades of trust with patients in minoritized Indiana communities.
Transcript:
In many instances we actually don’t know whether or not drugs are helpful or harmful in Black individuals, because they haven’t been included in studies in large enough numbers. And in fact, the National Academy of Medicine report on dementia care management specifically highlighted that there was a lack of knowledge in the field around individuals from various minoritized groups, including Blacks and in under-resourced or poorer communities. Because, again, they haven’t been included in prior studies. We were very fortunate, I think, and have to admit that we’re building on decades of trust that really has existed in the health systems and with the Regenstrief Institute doing studies involving patients with dementia in these populations.
