Patty Takawira

But there's discrimination, which is kind of like your dementia-friendly community work is really important.

working to support, right?

Like making your community dementia friendly, signage, you know, support for people living with dementia and caregivers, but then there's reducing stigma and that's a different concept.

And so we have both of those as key strategies within our educate and activate category of the dementia strategic plan, because the stigma issue is so strong and really

nuanced across different cultural communities.

So it just, you know, and it needs to be addressed in a really culturally specific way through trusted messengers, which I think will resonate with Clarence.

So yeah, I just wanted to mention that too.

Yeah, I think it's like a brief cognitive screen.

One issue is that there's this kind of the annual wellness exam that is reimbursed through Medicare, which is actually...

from what I, I mean, this is kind of where I get out of my own element, but like, I'm pretty sure that the reimbursement rate's pretty good, but it's underutilized.

But in that visit, it incorporates a brief cognitive screen, I think regardless of symptoms.

So that is one, like, that's something that I've been thinking about is why and how, like, why is it underutilized and what,

what would help people understand how to utilize that visit or, you know, how do we work with providers to, you know, what's an efficient way to utilize the annual wellness visit to think about early detection?

Yes.

Well, in Minnesota, the University of Minnesota actually supports.

So our work on dementia at MDH is partially funded through the BOLD Act, Building Our Largest Dementia Infrastructure.

And through that funding, there's also three centers of excellence to support state grantees.

The University of Minnesota operates as the bold center of excellence on dementia caregivers, and they're building out a ton of resources.

And I think.

a while back there was this campaign that Wilder led about kind of like helping people identify as a caregiver, because that's not necessarily how people identify, but that's sort of how the resources are communicated.