‘It’s having a tremendous impact.’ The many benefits of a new virtual care program for dementia patients

Head of Neurology at Baycrest Health Sciences, Dr. Morris Freedman says the virtual behaviour program focuses on controlling neuropsychiatric symptoms.

A new virtual hospital program is helping dementia patients receive care without forcing them to change locations.

Dr. Morris Freedman is the head of neurology at Baycrest Health Sciences in Toronto, and co-creator of the program. For dementia patients, changes in environment can be highly upsetting and can trigger neuropsychiatric symptoms, which Freedman describes as physical and verbal aggression, agitation, hallucinations and paranoia.

While virtual hospitals aren’t new, Freedman said, “what is new is a virtual hospital for these kinds of behaviors.”

“Before this type of program, people with these types of behaviors would get sent to emergency departments. With this program, we see the individuals virtually where they are. If they’re at home, we see them at home, without having them displaced to an unfamiliar environment. If they’re in a long-term care facility, we see them there and often avoid an admission to hospital,” Freedman told CTV Your Morning on Friday.

For patients already in an acute care hospital, Freedman described a potential added benefit, “if they’re in an acute care hospital where they’re waiting for long-term care but don’t qualify because of these behaviors, we can treat these behaviors so they do qualify.”

The program, he added “avoids uprooting people with dementia” to unfamiliar environments like an emergency department or an acute care hospital.

“The move itself can make the agitation and the aggression worse,” he said.

Baycrest Health Sciences has seen positive impacts as well, according to Freedman. “We have reduced the number of admissions to our specialized inpatient unit, by about 60 per cent,” he said. “In terms of cost savings, looking at the figures from 2022 to 2025, this avoided spending about 177-million dollars that would have otherwise been spent on inpatient care.”

Data from the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada shows 772,000 Canadians are currently living with dementia. That number is expected to climb to nearly one million by 2030.