Ardea Outcomes began as DementiaGuide Inc in 2000, a Dalhousie University spin-off company founded by world-renowned frailty and dementia expert, Dr. Kenneth Rockwood. With a passion for patient-centered research and care before it gained currency, Dr. Rockwood began using individualized approaches to assess health outcomes in the mid-90s. Most notably, he focused on Goal Attainment Scaling to capture the patient/caregiver voice as a principal investigator in early cholinesterase trials, in health policy studies, and to generate evidence for reimbursement decisions in Eastern Canada.
With positive feedback from caregivers for the use of Goal Attainment Scaling for shared decision-making in his dementia clinic, Dr. Rockwood and his team developed SymptomGuide®, a web-based tool for dementia caregiver support. This pioneering product allowed caregivers to select burdensome dementia symptoms from a clinically meaningful menu developed with clinician and caregiver input. By facilitating symptom tracking over time, SymptomGuide® allowed caregivers to monitor progress and engage in purposeful conversations around care planning with family and clinicians.
Since those early years, SymptomGuide® dementia has been used for observational research with caregivers across the globe and in Alzheimer Disease clinical trials as a primary, secondary and exploratory endpoint contributing not only to understanding whether therapeutic interventions are working but how they are working. With an established understanding of Goal Attainment Scaling in dementia, DementiaGuide Inc rebranded as DGI Clinical Inc and expanded into other CNS areas, including Parkinson’s Disease and Schizophrenia.
Over the past two decades, the global trend toward patient-centered research and care has fuelled demand for individualized outcome measures. DGI, in turn, was able to apply its expertise in Goal Attainment Scaling beyond CNS to hemophilia, oncology, and various rare disease areas. Having validated our approaches in various therapeutic areas, we have evolved naturally into Ardea Outcomes: a clinical research organization focused on individualized approaches to patient-centric outcomes measurement across a range of diseases.
Building off our deep understanding of Goal Attainment Scaling, we offer a suite of professional services to capture the patient voice throughout the clinical development journey, through market access, health technology assessments, and patient registries. SymptomGuide® has evolved into GoalNav™, a state-of-the-art electronic data capture platform purpose-built for individualized outcome measurement in registration trials, complemented by myGoalNav™, which facilitates remote follow-up by patients and caregivers. Our approach to trial implementation is supported by our team of research associates, trainers, and data scientists and our comprehensive online Goal Attainment Scaling training platform for investigators, raters and monitors.
Twenty years after its predecessor company's founding, the Ardea Outcomes team is still based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but is more extensive, and both its vision and impact are much broader. What hasn’t changed is the mission that drives our company and its talented, multi-disciplinary team members: a passion for putting patients at the center of research and care.