Case study · Recruitment & qualitative research
Recruiting the experts behind clinically meaningful change in Alzheimer’s agitation
MedPanel sourced and screened a specialist panel of physicians and professional caregivers for a peer-reviewed qualitative study on the Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory (CMAI).
Agitation is one of the most burdensome neuropsychiatric symptoms of Alzheimer’s dementia, yet little qualitative evidence existed to define how much change on the CMAI actually matters in practice. To answer that, the research team needed direct access to clinicians and caregivers who manage these patients every day — a notoriously hard-to-reach audience. MedPanel served as the specialty health-sciences recruitment vendor, identifying, screening, and enrolling the right participants from its healthcare-provider databases.
What counts as a meaningful change?
The CMAI is one of the most widely used scales for measuring the frequency of agitation behaviors in dementia, and it anchors efficacy endpoints in clinical trials. But a score change only matters if clinicians and caregivers consider it meaningful — and there was limited qualitative evidence describing how large that change needs to be to register as a real improvement.
Generating that evidence depended on reaching the people closest to the condition: neurologists and geriatricians who treat it, and the nurses and aides who provide daily care across both community and long-term-care settings. Recruiting and screening that precise, low-incidence mix is exactly where MedPanel was brought in.
How much of a reduction on the CMAI do physicians and professional caregivers regard as a clinically meaningful improvement in agitation?
What the research set out to do
A qualitative study designed to translate CMAI score changes into real-world meaning.
Characterize the magnitude of change in CMAI total score required to represent a clinically meaningful improvement in agitation — from both physician and caregiver perspectives.
Provide clinical context on how changes in agitation behaviors influence the day-to-day clinical management of people with Alzheimer’s dementia.
Capture how shifts in agitation behavior affect the lived experiences of patients, their families, and their caregivers.
Assemble a panel that reflects real-world care — spanning neurology and geriatrics, and both community and long-term-care settings.
Recruit, interview, analyze
A non-interventional, cross-sectional qualitative design — built on a carefully recruited panel.
Recruitment & screening
MedPanel identified candidates in its healthcare-provider databases and screened them against detailed eligibility criteria, using purposive sampling to balance neurology and geriatrics and to span community and institutional/long-term-care settings.
Qualitative interviews
Trained interviewers conducted one-on-one, ~60-minute semi-structured web interviews, using nine patient vignettes drawn from real clinical-trial CMAI score-change profiles over a 12-week period to probe what felt meaningful.
Coding & analysis
Transcripts were coded in ATLAS.ti using a combined deductive and inductive framework, with three transcripts dual-coded to confirm inter-coder agreement before independent coding of the remainder.
What clinicians and caregivers called meaningful
Responses varied across vignettes, but clear thresholds emerged.
unanimously clinically meaningful
Every vignette with a CMAI total-score reduction of 14 points or more was judged clinically meaningful by all participants — physicians and caregivers alike.
meaningful to most participants
A 5-point reduction was considered clinically meaningful by most physicians (about 62%) and most professional caregivers (about 54%).
can still matter on the right behavior
Most participants (roughly 71% of physicians and 77% of caregivers) felt a single-point change on an individual CMAI item could be meaningful, depending on the behavior.
aggressive behaviors weighed most
Aggressive behaviors mattered most when judging meaningfulness, and notably, no participant reported using the CMAI in routine practice — citing it as too cumbersome.
The recruitment that made the study possible
A study like this lives or dies on the panel. By sourcing and screening a precise, hard-to-reach mix of clinicians and caregivers, MedPanel gave the research team the participants it needed — on spec and across the right care settings.
The result was a robust qualitative dataset that translated abstract CMAI score changes into real-world meaning, ultimately published as an open-access, peer-reviewed paper. It is a clear example of how MedPanel’s recruitment capability underpins rigorous health-sciences research.
Hard-to-reach panel, delivered
Neurologists, geriatricians, and frontline nurses screened to tight criteria.
Real-world setting mix
Both community and long-term-care perspectives represented in the sample.
Peer-reviewed outcome
Findings published open access, contributing to the evidence base.
Published, peer-reviewed, open access
The study MedPanel helped make possible — available in full.
Physician & Professional Caregiver Perspectives on Meaningful Change in Agitation Behaviors in Alzheimer’s Dementia
A qualitative interview study characterising how physicians and professional caregivers interpret changes in CMAI scores, using nine vignettes based on real clinical-trial data. MedPanel recruited and screened the physician and caregiver participants for this study.
Read the full study
MedPanel provided participant recruitment and screening for this peer-reviewed study. Figures shown are drawn from the published article.