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Over 16 million caregivers of people living with dementia require support in a range of issues, including self-care, disease education, and guidance for how to manage behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). Non-pharmacological interventions are needed to address these areas, and online applications have been shown to be safe and effective. To ensure the efficacy of such interventions, racially, ethnically, geographically, and socioeconomically diverse participants must be recruited to increase the generalizability of study outcomes. This protocol paper describes a recruitment plan using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to reach a representative sample of caregivers across the United States for a national Phase III clinical study. Using publicly available census data from the American Community Survey (ACS), combined with location data for local aging resources such as Area Agencies on Aging (AAA), recruitment will be derived from data analysis conducted in ESRI ArcGIS v10.7.1. Datasets including age, gender, income, and education will be assessed nationally at the county and census tract spatial scale in a nine-step process to develop recruitment priority areas containing high concentrations of eligible participants living in the community. Overall, the current protocol will demonstrate the value of GIS in tailoring targeted outreach strategies to recruit community-dwelling populations through local resource institutions. This novel approach may have far-reaching implications in future recruitment initiatives and help to secure racially/ethnically diverse samples.

There are 200+ tested interventions for care partners (family, friends, and fictive kin) of people living with dementia (PLWD). But these interventions do not systematically cover relevant settings. Nor do these interventions affect all relevant outcomes that matter to people and healthcare systems. We present an evidence map of settings and outcomes from translated interventions to identify gaps. Of 190 studies identified, 31 unique interventions were retained in the evidence map. Identified setting gaps included studies set solely in hospitals/medical centers or set in multiple settings. Identified outcome gaps included interventions that improved care partner beliefs about providing care, care partner negative coping strategies, PLWD resources (e.g., social support), and PLWD coping strategies. Armed with an understanding of present gaps, we call on researchers to fill the identified gaps to ensure systematic coverage of settings and evaluation of outcomes that matter to people and healthcare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]