Dr. Donovan Maust is one of the few fellowship-trained geriatric psychiatrist health services researchers in the country. His work focuses on how the health care system provides care to persons living with dementia and the extent to which this care is determined by the clinicians who happen to be providing the care. A consistent area of his research has been psychotropic prescribing to older adults, though this has expanded to more broadly address the health care workforce caring for persons living with dementia (PLWD).
He was inaugurated earlier this year as the Department of Psychiatry’s first Williard C. Blackney Jr. and Geraldine LaTendresse Blackney Research Professor of Geriatric Psychiatry. He is also Associate Director for Research of the department’s Geriatric Psychiatry Program, one of the country’s largest academic geriatric psychiatry groups.
With colleagues at the University of California San Francisco, the U-M Survey Research Center, and elsewhere, Dr. Maust is co-leading the National Dementia Workforce Study (NDWS), a family of surveys of the professional dementia care workforce established in fall 2023 through an $81 million cooperative agreement with the NIH’s National Institute on Aging.
NDWS is conducting multiple annual, national surveys of community clinicians (e.g., physicians and nurse practitioners in primary care and psychiatry), and nursing home, assisted living, and home health care staff and administrators. Surveys are designed to help a broad network of researchers understand the composition and training of this large and diverse workforce, including physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, and direct care workers. Survey data will have the potential for linkage with a host of other data sources, including beneficiary-level Medicare claims, to create an unprecedented data resource.
The project aims to fill critical knowledge gaps in understanding the workforce’s impact on care and outcomes for older adults with dementia in order to ultimately lead to improved practice and policy. Year 1 surveys are currently in the field, with data anticipated in early Spring 2025.
NDWS is one of several ongoing projects of Dr. Maust’s that combine “big data” such as Medicare claims with interviews or surveys with health care workers and patients to understand and improve care for PLWD. His other work includes:
- A project supported by the National Institutes of Health that is examining the care of individuals with serious mental illness (SMI; e.g., schizophrenia or bipolar disorder) in nursing homes, which are one of the most important settings of care for those with SMI. The team hopes to identify strategies to help support and improve the care of this marginalized population.
- A project supported by the National Institutes of Health that is studying how and why potentially harmful combinations of psychotropic and opioid medications get prescribed to persons with dementia. The team is analyzing prescribing using Medicare data and then identifying primary care clinicians nationally for a survey about their prescription decision-making process in order to identify possible intervention targets.
- A project supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that is combining VA and Medicare data to examine how Veterans with dementia and their caregivers engage with the complex patchwork of VA and community services available to support those with dementia in the community.
Dr. Maust earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and completed his psychiatry residency and geriatric psychiatry fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Since joining U-M’s faculty in 2013, he has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator of more than $97 million in federal funding and has authored more than 115 publications.
