NIH awards Radial Analytics a Small Business Innovation Research grant to help advance the goals of the National Plan to Address Alzheimer's Disease

Competitive grant award will support groundbreaking AI/ML innovation for people living with Alzheimer's and related dementias

CONCORD, Mass., Jan. 26, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Radial Analytics has been awarded a NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to help advance the goals of the National Plan to Address Alzheimer's Disease. This highly competitive grant award will support rapid innovation by leveraging Radial's clinically proven AI/ML platform, which is used by healthcare professionals to optimize patient care transitions. The grant award will support a new research initiative to use big data and machine learning to accurately predict the clinical progression of people living with Alzheimer's and related dementias. Radial Analytics is partnering on this important work with Dr. Peter Rabins at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Professor Joseph Gaugler at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

The creation of Radial Analytics' AI/ML platform was inspired by the idea of using "nudge theory" to empower healthcare professionals to make better decisions. As defined by behavioral economists, "nudge theory" means using positive reinforcement and indirect suggestion to improve decision-making. The platform powers two existing commercial products: Smart Placement and Smart Placement Hospice. Smart Placement has a proven track record of ensuring more older adults get discharged home from the hospital with robust home-based healthcare services. Smart Placement Hospice helps enable timely referral to palliative and end-of-life care resources. Radial's results show better patient experience, improved outcomes, and lower costs. Smart Placement and Smart Placement Hospice are deployed with payers and hospitals across six states, delivering real-time insights that "nudge" nurses and caregivers in the right direction, enabling higher-quality and more cost-effective decisions for the seniors they serve.

This NIH SBIR grant will support novel research to more accurately identify later stages of Alzheimer's Disease. Alzheimer's Disease is increasing in prevalence, and the associated costs are rising unsustainably. Recent research has shown progress in diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease sooner and better evaluating cognitive function. However, end-of-life care remains inadequate for people living with Alzheimer's and their caregivers. Consequently, people living with Alzheimer's undergo unnecessary hospitalizations and earlier institutionalization, while their caregivers experience social isolation, financial hardship, and burnout. Radial's new research initiative will lead to better decision support tools for directing care resources to those people living with Alzheimer's who would benefit the most, ensuring better quality of life and appropriate support for caregivers. The research is further designed to promote health equity by identifying and adjusting for both environmental and social risk factors at the level of each individual.

Radial's research team for this NIH grant is led by Anant Vasudevan MD MBA, Radial Analytics Chief Medical Officer, Hospitalist at Brigham and Women's, and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "I often treat people living with Alzheimer's in the context of my work as a hospitalist at Brigham and Women's in Boston," says Dr. Vasudevan. "Even with the best tools currently available, it is very challenging for clinicians to accurately anticipate disease progression and identify how best to meet the needs of people living with Alzheimer's, especially in later stages of the disease. Radial's new NIH-funded research initiative seeks to directly address this challenge and ultimately stands to improve quality of life for both people living with Alzheimer's and their caregivers."

Radial Analytics will be partnering on this important work with Joseph Gaugler PhD, Professor and Robert L. Kane Endowed Chair in Long-Term Care and Aging at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. "In the course of my academic work, I have been struck by how people living with Alzheimer's receive too few essential supportive services, too late in their disease progression, and at too high a cost. Supported by this new funding from NIH, Radial Analytics aims to help care teams make more data-driven and efficient decisions to better care for people living with Alzheimer's," explains Dr. Gaugler.

"Small businesses play an important role in research aimed at discovering effective prevention and treatment strategies for Alzheimer's and related dementias," said Basil Eldadah, M.D., Ph.D., of the NIH National Institute on Aging. "With the help of NIH's Small Business Innovation Research Program, entrepreneurs are helping to address emerging support needs for people living with dementia and their care partners and improving equity in health care access for people living with these diseases."

Radial Analytics was founded with the vision of leveraging AI/ML technologies to support patients with every possible type of disease across the entire continuum of care. According to the Alzheimer's Association, one in three older adults dies with Alzheimer's or another dementia. Today's announcement brings Radial Analytics one step closer to a future reality in which AI and machine learning helps every patient at every step of their care journey.

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This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The research discussed above is supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health grant R43AG076191.

About Radial Analytics
Funded in part by Initialized Capital, MassVentures, the National Science Foundation, and now NIH, Radial Analytics builds AI/ML solutions to optimize patient care transitions. Radial's real-time decision support platform empowers clinical staff to intervene when it matters most.

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