2004 Senator Mark Hatfield Award for Clinical Research in Alzheimer’s Disease

There are a number of recommendations, based on the results of well-designed studies, for providing high quality outpatient dementia care. However, the extent to which these practices are being used and the relationship between these practices and the outcomes of care in the “real world” are poorly understood.

Daniel Murman, M.D., M.S., and colleagues will investigate the quality of dementia care in a suburban health care system in an effort to bridge the gap between evidenced-based research and usual care practices. The investigators will examine data from administrative records, medical records of people receiving outpatient dementia care and results of a mailed caregiver survey. This data will assessed with respect to 26 quality indicators, or benchmarks for medical care that have been demonstrated in previous studies.

From this evaluation, the researchers will design an index of care that enables them to assess quality of care among different population groups. They anticipate that the quality of care will be lower among African-Americans, women, and the oldest people with dementia. They expect to observe better care among those people who were referred to dementia specialists.

The research team will also evaluate how the degree of research-based medical care relates to outcomes in the health-related quality of life for people with dementia, caregiver satisfaction with medical care and costs of care.

The outcome of this study may provide information about deficiencies in outpatient dementia care and a model for assessing the impact of research-based care in real-life clinical settings.