Elli Kaplan has spent more than a decade working to change how Alzheimer’s is diagnosed, but the roots of that work go back much further. In a recent conversation with Howdy’s CEO Studio, Neurotrack’s co-founder and CEO looks back on her path from childhood watching her father care for families with little access to healthcare, through her years in the Clinton White House and her grandparents’ search for an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, to founding Neurotrack.
Where it started
Elli's father was a pediatrician with the Indian Health Service, and she spent most of her childhood on reservations in Washington State and Oklahoma. She remembers tribal elders arriving at the house late at night with very sick children, often after traditional remedies had run their course, and families thanking her father with firewood, beef, and handmade moccasins. Those years gave her an early sense of how unevenly healthcare reaches people, and how mistrust and lack of access let preventable conditions go unaddressed.
She was pre-med until her junior year, when working for Tony Lake, then Governor Clinton’s senior foreign policy adviser, drew her into the campaign and later the White House and State Department. Working at a national level showed her a different kind of impact than the one she grew up watching.
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"My dad and my grandfather, they had such a huge impact, but it was one patient at a time, one family at a time. The opportunity to really think about populations and how you have an impact at the population level was what got me more excited." |
A diagnosis that took too long
Elli describes her path into Alzheimer's care as accidental. While she was in business school, her grandfather, also a physician, began showing signs of memory loss, and his primary care doctor told the family it was a normal part of getting older. Even a referral to neurology didn't produce a definitive answer until his doctors recognized the hallmarks of Alzheimer's. A few years later her grandmother went through the same experience. As friends shared similar stories about their own parents, Elli went looking for answers and found two Emory University neuroscientists building tools to detect impairment before it was too late to act. In 2012, they co-founded Neurotrack to bring that research into clinical care.
Building for a moment that hadn't arrived
In Neurotrack's early years, drug candidates aimed at slowing Alzheimer's kept failing, but the team kept validating its technology on the belief that the field would get there and wanting to be ready when it did. Part of the reason those trials struggled was because they were enrolling patients whose disease was already too advanced, and earlier diagnosis could help change that.
Today, Elli says, the difference is night and day. Two therapies have FDA approval, CMS has made cognitive assessment part of the Medicare Annual Wellness Visit, and conversations about brain health are becoming more open, even as stigma persists for many older adults. She also spends time on why two-thirds of people living with Alzheimer’s are women, which Elli writes about in more depth in her recent blog on Alzheimer’s as a women’s health issue.
Helping primary care do something new
Much of Neurotrack's work is supporting primary care providers through something most were never trained to do: diagnose Alzheimer's at the population level and talk with patients and families about what it means. Elli describes it as a behavior change as much as a new tool, since providers have to get comfortable interpreting results and having difficult conversations with families. To help them get there, Neurotrack's implementation and customer success team works side by side with physicians and the medical assistants who first introduce the assessment to patients.
Once providers felt confident making a diagnosis, the question became what to do with it. Neurotrack responded with patient-specific care plans that give clinicians the context to choose the right next step, whether that's a referral to neurology, evaluation for an approved therapy, or continued care in primary care.
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"The goal is that the millions of people who are walking around with the disease but are undiagnosed have a diagnosis and a plan for treatment and the opportunity to, as I like to say, die from something else." |
Watch the full conversation
The full interview goes further, including what it takes to win over both a health system’s chief medical officer and its CFO, Elli's practical advice for protecting your brain at any age, and her closing thoughts on how speaking openly about brain health can ease the stigma that keeps families from raising concerns with an aging parent. Watch it in full below.
