Toronto — Senior primary care provider Claremedica has identified more than 90% of newly diagnosed dementia cases at the early or mild stage after replacing paper-based cognitive screening with a digital assessment platform from Creyos, according to preliminary results released by the companies.
Claremedica, which serves more than 34,000 Medicare Advantage patients at over 35 locations in Florida, began using the Creyos platform seven months ago in place of the Mini-Mental State Examination, or MMSE.
The organization said its overall dementia identification rate more than doubled after the change. Nearly 80% of patients newly identified with dementia had previously undergone MMSE screening at Claremedica without their cognitive decline being detected.
“In primary care, we’re trained to look at vital signs: temperature, blood pressure, heart rate,” said Dr. Nehal Gheewala, Chief Medical Officer at Claremedica. “But not cognition, which changes just as subtly over time. So we asked ourselves: what would happen if we could?”
Creyos assesses several areas of cognition, including memory, attention, reasoning and executive function. The tablet-based assessment can be administered by a medical assistant and returns structured results intended to help clinicians determine appropriate next steps.
Claremedica said average screening time declined to about six minutes from roughly 12 minutes with the MMSE, potentially saving about 90 minutes per day across a typical physician’s patient load.
The platform supports 13 languages, including Haitian Creole, and integrates with more than 90 electronic health record systems, including Epic and athenahealth.
Claremedica said physician adoption of the platform exceeded 95% on the first day of deployment, the highest initial adoption rate among 10 clinical technology programs introduced as part of its disease-detection initiative.
Before implementation, Creyos Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Professor Adrian Owen presented research and clinical evidence behind the platform to Claremedica physicians and staff.
“I don’t ask clinicians to trust me, I ask them to look at the evidence and decide for themselves,” Owen said.
Claremedica is now studying whether earlier identification of cognitive impairment is associated with changes in patient outcomes, including falls, avoidable hospitalizations and overall healthcare costs. The organization plans to track those outcomes over the next 12 to 24 months.
