Creyos, a leader in digital cognitive and behavioral health assessment, today announced initial results from its rollout with Claremedica, a value-based senior primary care organization serving over 34,000 Medicare Advantage patients across more than 35 sites in Florida. In the seven months since replacing paper-based cognitive screening with Creyos, Claremedica has identified over 90% of new dementia cases at the early or mild stage, the point at which proactive care planning is still possible. This achievement highlights the effectiveness of Claremedica in leveraging technology to enhance patient care.
Claremedica’s Innovative Approach to Cognitive Health
Nationally, over 60% of cognitive impairment goes unidentified in primary care, even as the number of Americans living with Alzheimer’s is projected to nearly double, from 7 million today to a projected 13 million by 2050. Most primary care clinics still rely on screeners like the Mini-Cog, MoCA, or, in Claremedica’s case, the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE), a paper-based test that can flag moderate-to-severe decline but is prone to missing earlier-stage impairment, with results that can vary depending on who administers it. Claremedica’s initiative aims to address this gap.
“In primary care, we’re trained to look at vital signs: temperature, blood pressure, heart rate,” said Dr. Nehal Gheewala, Chief Medical Officer at Claremedica. “But not cognition, which changes just as subtly over time. So we asked ourselves: what would happen if we could enhance detection at Claremedica?”
Claremedica had used the MMSE organization-wide for more than two years before switching to Creyos. Nearly 80% of the patients newly identified with dementia had been screened by Claremedica before using the MMSE, sometimes more than once, without their decline registering on the earlier test. Company-wide, Claremedica’s dementia identification rate more than doubled after the switch, driven almost entirely by these earlier-stage catches that are known to be missed by traditional screeners, rather than any change in diagnostic practices.
Creyos replaces the MMSE’s single pass/fail score with a domain-level cognitive profile spanning memory, attention, reasoning, and executive function. A medical assistant administers the assessment on a tablet, without physician supervision required, and results return as structured data with recommended next steps.
Average screening time dropped from roughly 12 minutes with the MMSE to six minutes with Creyos, returning close to 90 minutes a day to a typical physician’s caseload. The platform supports 13 languages, including Haitian Creole which was critical for Claremedica’s patient population, and integrates with more than 90 electronic health record systems, including Epic and athenahealth.
Claremedica’s success has, in part, been driven by strong physician buy-in. Adoption reached more than 95% on day one, the highest first-day adoption of any of the 10 clinical technology rollouts in Claremedica’s disease-detection program to date.
Ahead of launch, Claremedica brought in Creyos co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Professor Adrian Owen to present the research behind the platform across the organization, before a single patient was screened. “We shut down operations across the entire organization so that everyone – from clinical leaders to administrative staff – could participate in Professor Owen’s talk,” Gheewala said. “It was an important, although maybe risky, move to really convey how seriously we were taking this and our desire to be a leader when it comes to cognitive care. A year into this, we’re happy to say that decision was right.”
For Owen, the session itself was never meant to be persuasion, it was meant to be transparency.
“I don’t ask clinicians to trust me, I ask them to look at the evidence and decide for themselves,” said Owen. “So that’s what we did before Claremedica screened a single patient: I walked their physicians through three decades of research, the peer-reviewed studies, how the tasks were validated, how they were built. Clinicians are, rightly, skeptical of new tools until they’ve seen the science behind them. Once they had, the confidence wasn’t something we had to build, it was already there.”
“Creyos hasn’t just changed things for our patients and their caregivers,” Gheewala said. “It has changed the way our primary care providers think about what is possible when it comes to managing cognitive decline, and that is how you achieve better outcomes.”
Claremedica is now tracking how earlier identification correlates with downstream outcomes, including falls, avoidable hospitalizations, and total cost of care, over the next 12 to 24 months.
More details about the Creyos and Claremedica partnership can be found at https://creyos.com/case-studies/claremedica.
