Amy Kind

About

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 theme area affiliations

Demography of Inequality; Health and the Life Course

Selected Publications

Kind, Amy, Buckingham, William. “Making Neighborhood-Disadvantage Metrics Accessible—the Neighborhood Atlas.” The New England Journal of Medicine 378, no. 2456-2458 (2018). PubMed Central ID 6051533.