A new partnership among the Rollins School of Public Health, the University of Minnesota, and Johns Hopkins University will lead to the creation of a national resource meant to advance and evaluate dementia care programs across the U.S.
The State Alzheimer’s Research Support Center, funded through a $17 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, is slated to bring together collaborative research efforts and create a national database to evaluate state and regional dementia care programs.
According to a news release announcing the effort, the database will examine effectiveness, accessibility, and equity so that successful programs can be adapted more widely across the senior living and care industry. The center also is set to provide pilot funding to assist states with evaluating coordinated dementia care services and policies that help people with dementia stay in their homes and communities.
“We want to encourage the uptake of programs that we know work in one state and share them with other states, with suggestions for the components that could work best for them, and do this across the United States,” said Regina Shih, PhD, professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Health Policy and Management at Rollins.
The support center will prioritize projects that study the impact of dementia care services in “under-resourced communities” to ensure data from marginalized groups are included in the national data effort. Rates of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are more prevalent among Black and Hispanic people in the U.S. compared to non-Hispanic white older adults, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
The center will also build partnerships with state and regional partners to establish collaboration between groups providing dementia care in the same state; support dementia care pilot projects for up to 16 states to assess outcomes of dementia care; merge multiple data sources to more accurately evaluate and compare dementia care services; and draft a dissemination strategy for furthering dementia care innovation.
“By building the infrastructure to coordinate and centralize data, the goal of StARS is to foster innovation in dementia care, spur policy innovations to finance and expand successful programs, and enhance the overall well-being of people living with dementia and their caregivers,” said co-principal investigator Joseph Gaugler, PhD, from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
Researchers from Brown University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Alzheimer’s Association will also partner with the new support center.