Approximately 50 million people worldwide live with dementia, a number expected to triple by 2050, according to the World Alzheimer Report. In Australia, there is still a need to substantially improve our methods for counting people with dementia. Accurate Identification is critical to understanding the true size of the problem nationally, and to be able to effectively plan services.  However, routine health data that are currently used for this purpose probably underestimate the numbers of people with dementia.

Regular healthcare contact and hospitalisations provide an important opportunity to address this issue. Currently, in hospitals, dementia is recorded based on gathering of information in the medical records by medical coders, who find it difficult to look through the vast amount of written information in the records. In a study involving over 1,000 individuals aged 60 and above in the Frankston-Mornington Peninsula, algorithms using traditional data approaches with AI in electronic health records demonstrated high accuracy in identifying whether or not a person may have dementia.

Supported by national health bodies, the initiative could transform how dementia is identified, counted for national estimates, and managed in healthcare settings. Given the global rise in dementia cases and the difficulty in accurately identifying patients through conventional medical coding, this approach has the ability to transform the Australian landscape in this field.

The research team based at Peninsula Health, involving NCHA’s Healthy Ageing Data Platform group and clinicians from Australia and the USA, have tackled this problem using AI, and found that a particular type of AI called natural language processing (NLP) applied to written text in medical records significantly enhances dementia identification capacity.

Source: https://www.monash.edu/medicine/news/latest/2025-articles/how-ai-can-improve-dementia-detection