AHC Impact Project Committee Chair Melissa Young and fellow Upstream partner Paul Kramer will lead a structured and facilitated creative session that taps into the mindshare and diversity of experience that exists within council membership.

Only 50% of people living with Alzheimer’s Disease in the US get diagnosed. Of those, only half are told of their diagnosis. Upstream has been working with the Alzheimer’s Association to help them better understand the pathway to diagnosis for people living with the disease (“PLWD”) and their care partners (“CP”) in an effort to increase diagnosis and access to quality care. We took a holistic view by also engaging primary care physicians, nurse practitioners and health system administrators to understand the barriers they face in identifying and delivering a diagnosis while working within the constraints of the health system. From this qualitative research, Upstream developed a system view of the path to diagnosis, identifying 7 distinct opportunities where the Alzheimer’s Association can drive impact.

“The Alzheimer’s Association is known for how well it serves PLWDs and CPs after diagnosis. Upstream is now helping them to focus their efforts on influencing the healthcare system to improve the path to diagnosis. A key part of tackling the opportunities we’ve identified in the prior step will be to engage external stakeholders in the solutioning process. To do this, we need help inviting stakeholders that are not already engaged with the Association to the table. Our objective is to bring together views across the healthcare system (from payors, policy makers, providers, regulators, etc) to generate ideas that address the opportunity areas defined in our work. This collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach to creative problem solving is called “co-creation”. The output of this co-creation work will ultimately drive future development of solutions (tools, services, applications, partnerships, etc.) that support better outcomes for not only PLWDs and CPs but care providers as well. ”