Caregiver as Navigator: Develop Skills Online (CAN-DO)

Family members and friends are the core of the uncoordinated system of care that tenuously maintains persons living with dementia in their community settings and delays their placement into more costly settings of institutional care, providing more contributed and out of pocket care support than Medicare and Medicaid combined. The CAN-DO program fills a significant gap in caregiver psychoeducation programming by focusing not principally on day-to-day care management but on the many substantial system navigation tasks that caregivers assume. Supported by preliminary efficacy data, CAN-DO will employ state-of-the art asynchronous interactive learning methods to enhance caregivers' mastery of skills and confidence to navigate healthcare and other (legal, financial, social service, and family) systems that are crucial to the continued community living of persons affected with dementia illnesses. This study will enroll 270 dementia family caregivers who will be randomized to take the CAN-DO course immediately or after a waiting period. They will participate in interviews before and after the course; total time of study participation is 6 months.