Andrea Hartzell
Scientific Director
Health and Wellness Partners, LLC
Keeping TD In Mind
When Andrea Hartzell, PhD started at Health and Wellness Partners two years ago on the disease state education program for tardive dyskinesia (TD) one statistic really impacted her: it is believed that 600,000 people have TD in the U.S., but only 23% actually receive a diagnosis. That means tens of thousands of people suffer the effects of this disease without treatment. Andrea works tirelessly to change this statistic.
Andrea supported the release of MIND-TD.com, a comprehensive educational platform about TD sponsored by Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc. that has had nearly 45,000 users since its launch in 2020. She spent her days gathering and synthesizing information from clinician advisory boards, scientific and medical experts in the field, patient interactions, and the scientific literature, to close the gap in TD by communicating this complex information internally to the team behind MIND-TD.com (including editors, creative designers, and an entire account team), externally to the client, and finally to the medical community.
Externally, Andrea is viewed as a trusted expert by clients, who rely on her knowledge and communication skills to unify the whole team behind a shared medical vision. Her team helped develop four key screening questions to serve as an efficient, brief, and practical TD screening tool for clinicians to use at every encounter with patients on antipsychotic therapy.
Andrea introduced mnemonics to help clinicians remember the questions by folding them under the acronym MIND. The attention to clinician learning styles resulted in a unique, impactful, and easy-to-remember method of TD screening. An HCP who collaborated on the MIND-TD questionnaire said, “The ‘MIND’ approach has been a complete hit in our practice setting with all clinicians, regardless of their level of training. It is easy to understand, is quite intuitive, and most importantly, is memorable. Within just a few uses most clinicians memorized what MIND stands for and incorporated it into their daily clinical practice.”
Andrea shares her gift as a master educator to the broader medical community through the delivery of effective educational materials that utilize the principles of adult learning as well as a passion to make a difference in the lives of patients.
