Amy Kind

I am an Associate Professor at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, founding Director of the UW Department of Medicine Health Services and Care Research Program and Director of the Madison VA Dementia and Cognitive Care Clinic. As a practicing geriatrician and a PhD health services/implementation scientist, I lead a robust research program focused on assessing and improving care for highly vulnerable and disadvantaged older adult populations, especially those with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and other dementias. I strive to develop novel ways to eliminate health disparities through innovative research in health outcomes, health policy and clinical programs.

I am a national leader in the field of neighborhood-level socioeconomic contextual disparities, especially as they relate to health outcomes and Medicare policy. Our updated neighborhood disadvantage metric – the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) – incorporates poverty, education, housing and employment indicators; predicts disparity-related health outcomes; and is employed by multiple US States and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) through our provision. CMS is now using our ADI as a novel eligibility criteria for one of its national disparities programs. I receive R01 funding to support this research from the NIH/NIMHD (PI: Kind), and I serve as a technical expert on these issues for CMS. I am also leading efforts to determine the impact of timing and dosage of neighborhood disadvantage exposure on Alzheimer’s Disease, with particular interest in outcomes of AD-specific pathologic features, vascular burden and cognitive decline (NIH/NIA R01, PI: Kind; MPI: Bendlin). Furthermore, I design, lead and assess systems interventions which improve care for high-risk older adult patients with AD, and which are particularly applicable in low-resource and safety-net hospital settings. Some of these programs have disseminated widely. One of these, the Coordinated-Transitional Care (C-TraC) Program, is a low-cost, mostly phone-based intervention designed to improve hospital-to-home transitions, has disseminated to multiple US hospitals, and is the focus of a 5-year NIH/NIA-funded randomized controlled trial (PI: Kind) and a 2-year CMS pilot grant for dissemination to highly disadvantaged areas.

CDE Research Area Affiliations:

Demography of Inequality; Health and the Life Course

Selected Publications:

Schletzbaum, Maria, W. Ryan Powell, Shivani Garg, Joseph Kramer, Brad C. Astor, Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi, Amy J. Kind, and Christie M. Bartels. “Receipt of rheumatology care and lupus-specific labs among young adults with systemic lupus erythematosus: A US Medicare retention in care cohort study.” Lupus 33, no. 8 (2024): 804-815.

Robison, Raele Donetha, Nicole Butz, Sara Gustafson, Steven Wang, Jason Falvey, Meredith Mackowicz-Torres, Nicole Rogus-Pulia, and Amy Kind. “Ready for Discharge, but Are They Ready to Go Home? Examining Neighborhood-Level Disadvantage as a Marker of the Social Exposome and the Swallowing Care Process in a Retrospective Cohort of Inpatients With Dementia.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 33, no. 3 (2024): 1536-1547.

Bartels, Christie M., Yi Chen, W. Ryan Powell, Melissa A. Rosenkranz, Barbara B. Bendlin, Joseph Kramer, William W. Busse, and Amy Kind. “Alzheimer incidence and prevalence with and without asthma: A Medicare cohort study.” Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (2024).

Chiu, Alexander S., Markayle Schears, Mary Hitchcock, Rebecca Sippel, and Amy Kind. “Disparities in the treatment of primary hyperparathyroidism: A scoping review and conceptual model.” The American Journal of Surgery (2024).

Melcher, Eleanna M., Leigha Vilen, Aly Pfaff, Sarah Lim, Amanda DeWitt, W. Ryan Powell, Barbara B. Bendlin, and Amy JH Kind. “Deriving life‐course residential histories in brain bank cohorts: A feasibility study.” Alzheimer’s & Dementia (2024).