Vanderbilt builds Alzheimer's referral AI

Vanderbilt Health said on August 5 that its researchers received a grant from Eli Lilly and Company to build an artificial intelligence tool inside the health system’s electronic health record to speed referrals for Alzheimer’s treatment. The Nashville-based project will focus on patients moving from primary care or geriatrics into neurology evaluation for newly available therapies, according to Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The grant will fund an 18-month, $600,000 effort led by You Chen, an associate professor of biomedical informatics, with neurologist Amalia Peterson and geriatrician Sean Huang as co-principal investigators. ### Where in the care pathway is Vanderbilt trying to intervene? Vanderbilt said the tool is aimed at the referral stage, before a patient reaches a neurology clinic. The health system said patients who may qualify for newer Alzheimer’s therapies can wait weeks while moving through referrals, specialist evaluation, brain imaging and insurance authorization before a first infusion. (news.vumc.org) The AI system will be embedded in Vanderbilt Health’s EHR and triggered when a clinician enters a referral for cognitive concern, the medical center said. It will summarize relevant chart information, flag missing details that commonly delay evaluation, and suggest whether a case should be routed as priority or standard. (news.vumc.org) ### What will the software actually do inside the EHR? The Vanderbilt team said the project is designed as an AI triage agent rather than a diagnostic tool. Clinicians will keep the ability to accept, edit or override every recommendation, according to the medical center’s announcement. Amalia Peterson, an assistant professor of neurology and co-principal investigator, said delays often accumulate before patients reach specialty care. “By the time a patient reaches our clinic, the clock has often been running for weeks,” Peterson said. (news.vumc.org) She said the tool is intended to make sure referrals arrive with the information needed to act quickly and “doesn’t replace clinical judgment.” ### Why is Lilly funding this project? Eli Lilly markets Kisunla, or donanemab-azbt, an amyloid-targeting treatment for early symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease, and has continued to publish data on diagnostics and treatment pathways around Alzheimer’s care. In a July 9 company release ahead of the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, Lilly said it would present research on Kisunla and on P-tau217 blood biomarker testing. (news.vumc.org) Vanderbilt said the grant supports a workflow project that it wants to make transferable to other health systems. Chen said the team sees the funding as support for “AI-enabled health care delivery,” while the medical center separately noted that he also leads an ongoing $1 million Lilly-funded project on obesity-care gaps. (investor.lilly.com) ### How will Vanderbilt measure whether the project works? The Vanderbilt group said it will first map where delays build up by using AI to reconstruct care timelines from a cohort of more than 5,300 Vanderbilt Health patients. Researchers will then identify the causes of those delays with input from clinicians and operational staff before deploying and evaluating the tool in a pilot. (news.vumc.org) Sean Huang, an assistant professor of medicine and biomedical informatics, said the dementia-care pathway often begins in primary care or geriatrics, where the next steps can be hard for patients and families to navigate. Vanderbilt said the main outcome for the pilot will be whether it reduces the time from diagnosis to first infusion. (news.vumc.org) ### Is this an AI diagnosis project or an operations project? Vanderbilt described the system as a referral and triage tool built to remove administrative friction in a treatment pathway, not to make autonomous clinical decisions. The project’s design centers on chart summarization, missing-information checks and referral routing inside clinician workflow. (news.vumc.org) The next step is a pilot deployment at Vanderbilt Health after the team completes its delay mapping and root-cause analysis, with success measured by time from diagnosis to first infusion, the medical center said. (news.vumc.org)