Source: Alzheimer’s Association
Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi, PhD, RN, has been awarded a two-year research grant from the Alzheimer’s Association Wisconsin Chapter for her work on, “Person-centered Outcome Measures for Alzheimer’s disease Patient Emergency Care Experiences.”
The $249,621 Advancing Research on Care and Outcome Measurement (ARCOM) award will fund a study that will establish care priorities of people living with dementia during visits to the emergency department and develop patient-centered tools to evaluate and measure those priorities. This is a particularly pressing research gap as interventions to improve emergency care for people with dementia are expanding rapidly but without adequate tools to assess their impact on patients and caregivers.
“People affected by dementia are often heavy utilizers of emergency department (ED) care,” says Gilmore-Bykovskyi. “The ED can be a challenging environment for people experiencing dementia, accompanied by bright lighting, noise, interruptions, and a lack of familiarity. People with dementia are also at high risk for worse outcomes. We have a gap where we don’t have a good understanding of the needs of those with dementia in this setting. The end result of this study will be a better understanding of what matters and what is most important to someone living with dementia during their encounter in the emergency department, as well as tools to evaluate those priorities.”
By partnering with people living with dementia and caregivers, Dr. Gilmore-Bykovskyi aims to equip emergency medicine and dementia care researchers to better identify and measure meaningful improvements in care for these individuals. Dr. Gilmore-Bykovskyi is among two other researchers at UW–Madison who were recently awarded research grants by the Alzheimer’s Association Wisconsin Chapter.
Dr. Gilmore-Bykovskyi is an Associate Professor with Tenure and the Associate Vice Chair of Research in the BerbeeWalsh Department of Emergency Medicine, UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and an Investigator in the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. She directs an active program of research focused on promoting effective and equitable care and research for persons living with and at risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, with a particular emphasis on addressing the needs of vulnerable populations.
Dr. Gilmore-Bykovskyi is also the founding Deputy Director for the University of Wisconsin Center for Health Disparities Research.