Marisa McGinley, DO: Taking a Comprehensive Approach to MS

“We’re used to looking at patients in these little snippets—what’s their walk look like, how do they tell me their functioning at home, what’s their MRI—but how do we do this comprehensively on a consistent basis?”

At the Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) at Cleveland Clinic, physicians are leveraging technology to help them in tracking disease progression and disability measures for their patients.

One of the physicians using this comprehensive approach is Marisa McGinley, DO. She and her colleagues have a suite of iPad apps which they use to measure a variety of standardized outcomes in MS in their own way, from the 25-foot walk test to the 9-hole peg test, a processing speed test and more. Additionally, they’ve developed in-house quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques developed by Kunio Nakamura, PhD, to help assess patients in a multi-modal fashion.

McGinley sat with NeurologyLive at the Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS) 2019 Forum in Dallas, Texas, to discuss how collecting this host of demographics and MRI measures has helped the Mellen Center physicians better predict future disability and progression in individual patients. MS, she explained, is a complex disease, and being able to capture and understand this in a more complete manner can help improve patient care.