Brown University’s Mor on What Will Define Success, Following Award of $53.4M Alzheimer’s Grant
Brown University’s Mor on What Will Define Success, Following Award of $53.4M Alzheimer’s Grant
Mor, who joined GoLocalProv News Editor Kate Nagle in studio in downtown Providence, spoke to the collaboration with Boston-based Hebrew SeniorLife, the structure of the process moving forward following the award of the grant — and what he says he believes will constitute “success.”
“I’m collaborating with a longtime colleague of mine — Susan Mitchell [at Hebrew SeniorLife], she is a physician epidemiologist, and her clinical work for years has been focusing on people with dementia, receiving long-term care services, and she’s been part of several of my grants in the past,” said Mor.
Mor spoke to their work on a recent grant to look at video-assisted advanced care planning in the nursing home setting “specifically looking at people in nursing homes with dementia or life-limiting illnesses who have not yet done any kind of advanced care planning — and so the notion was how do you take that idea which works in some senses, and actually integrate it into the daily operating procedures of [nursing] homes across the country, and we’re almost at the end of the at study. So when this opportunity came up, we said what a natural idea for the two of us continue working together.”
In anticipation of receiving the grant from the National Institutes for Aging, Mor said he and Mitchell were ready to get started when the grant was announced.
“We actually had planned to start this grant sometime in May. We’re actually quite thankful we had time to get all set up, so literally [Tuesday] when the announcement went out — half an hour later, we sent requests for applications, for people to submit letters of intent, throughout the entire country. We had about five or six hundred different institutions and individuals.”
Five Year Plan
Mor spoke to the grant's two objectives — the first, to fund and provide expert assistance to up to 40 trials that will test non-drug, care-based interventions for people living with dementia, and the second, to develop best practices for implementing and evaluating interventions for Alzheimer’s and dementia care and share them with the research community at large.
"I’ll think we will have been successful if by the end of five years, there are three or four kind of projects that catch on, where a managed care plan or hospital system or a nursing home company with multiple places says, ‘Yes, we’ve adopted it as part of our daily routine,’ and so this notion of embedding an intervention that helps support the care of people living with Alzheimer’s disease actually becomes live, and it’s part of standard operating procedure — that will have been successful," said Mor. "And if it’s successful, then we are likely to have another five years of about a comparable amount of money going forward."