Digital Transformation to Reduce Social Isolation and Improve the Engagement, Care, and Support of Individuals Living with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias: Diversity Supplement

Social isolation and loneliness accelerate cognitive and functional decline, increase premature mortality, and significantly reduce quality of life in older Americans. Social isolation and loneliness are associated with $6.7 billion in additional Medicare spending annually, and are key drivers of inefficient, ineffective, and costly care. Individuals living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) and their caregivers experience loneliness and isolation at greater rates and solutions to increase social connectivity in these populations are needed. However, existing interventions are often limited in reach, fail to overcome significant barriers to scalability, and are not specifically tailored towards the effective engagement of individuals with ADRD and their caregivers. Determined Health created the Connect CallHub (CCH) to provide an end-to-end solution for organizations seeking to combat social isolation and improve health and well-being, with particular emphasis in meeting the needs of individuals living with ADRD and informal caregivers of people with ADRD. Facilitating safe, secure, meaningful, and effective engagement, the platform addresses isolation while establishing an infrastructure to target a full range of social determinants of health (SDoH) – the factors related to where/how people live, learn, work, and play that profoundly impact health and well-being. Driving digital transformation across these efforts will enable effective collaboration between disparate stakeholders invested in improving the health and well-being of vulnerable seniors while reducing healthcare costs. The overall objectives of this Phase I SBIR project are to deploy key features that will improve the CCH platform and to ensure the feasibility of using this updated platform with individuals with ADRD and their caregivers. Aim 1: Feature Development: Using insights from initial beta-testing, further develop the software to increase capabilities and features. Milestones include deploying new features such as SMS, email, and voice communications to all users or select user groups; voice automated surveys for measurement and screening to facilitate data collection for process improvement and clinical validation studies; and refinement of reporting and user dashboards to track key call metrics. Aim 2: Feasibility (usability/acceptability): Conduct a pilot assessment of the updated platform and its acceptability across the ecosystem of stakeholders and end-users. Milestones include 1) qualitative and quantitative data collection and synthesis and 2) collaboration across the ecosystem for an assessment of the feasibility of using the platform for reaching a population of patients with ADRD and caregivers of people with ADRD, validating new features for broader distribution so that efficacy studies can be performed. This will lay the groundwork for a Phase II SBIR application to scale deployment and evaluate whether CCH is effective among these populations in reducing social isolation, anxiety, depression, and overall healthcare costs and whether data collected over the platform can be leveraged to improve detection of unmet SDoH needs, detect changes in cognition, and assist efforts to support aging in place.