SUMMARY
Allen W. Brown, M.D., studies the process of providing medical rehabilitation care to people after their brain function has been changed by injury or disease. The long-term goal of Dr. Brown's research is to help people participate in roles that are meaningful to them. He aims to do this through testing of rehabilitation models of care in the real world.
Dr. Brown's research team works in communities in the Upper Midwest to study population-based epidemiology of brain injury. In collaboration with community agencies, the team also studies new technology interventions to provide brain rehabilitation services remotely. The team does this by designing randomized, pragmatic clinical trials of complex behavioral interventions to improve quality of life after brain injury.
Focus areas
- Epidemiology of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Dr. Brown and colleagues have established a population-based cohort of people with TBI using the resources of the Rochester Epidemiology Project. A recently funded analysis expanded this cohort to study associations between TBI and Alzheimer's disease and related dementias when compared with a matched control group. Current funding provides contemporary estimates of the incidence of seizures after TBI, using clinical, brain imaging and neurophysiological data combined with artificial intelligence to identify risk of developing post-traumatic epilepsy.
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Community-based randomized pragmatic clinical trials. Dr. Brown is the project director of Mayo Clinic's Traumatic Brain Injury Model System Center. The goal of the current study is to test a model of care that uses a complex behavioral intervention integrating the expertise of Mayo's Brain Rehabilitation Clinic with the Minnesota Brain Injury Alliance Resource Facilitation program.
This community-based, randomized, pragmatic clinical trial delivers Mayo Clinic's medical-rehabilitation clinical services and resource facilitation services remotely using telemedicine and other communication technology. It's aimed at testing whether outcomes over time are better in a group receiving this model of care compared with a group that receives usual care in their communities. The goal is to develop a sustainable and cost-effective model of telemedicine care.
Significance to patient care
Population-based epidemiology allows health care providers to estimate health care needs over time. Using this knowledge, Dr. Brown's team designs community-based clinical trials to address these needs so that the results can be immediately applied to clinical care in the real world, because the clinical interventions are tested in the communities in which they'll be used.
Dr. Brown collaborates with community organizations, state agencies, private companies and local providers who are involved in both the design and implementation of the research, ensuring a translational research process.