Our Story
Ardea Outcomes was founded by world-renowned frailty and dementia expert, Dr. Kenneth Rockwood, as DementiaGuide in 2000 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. With a passion for patient-centered research and care before it gained currency, Dr. Rockwood began using personalized approaches to assess health outcomes in the mid-1990s. Most notably, he focused on Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) to capture the patient /caregiver voice as a principal investigator in early cholinesterase trials, in health policy studies, and to generate evidence for reimbursement decisions in Eastern Canada.
It was around this time that Dr. Rockwood agreed to supervise Chere Chapman’s BSc honors thesis, inspiring her career in epidemiology which ultimately spanned three countries. While Chere was studying and building her global career in Japan, Toronto, Singapore, and Vietnam, Dr. Rockwood was developing SymptomGuide®, a digital GAS tool for dementia caregiver research.
As the company expanded to other CNS areas, including Parkinson’s disease and Schizophrenia, DementiaGuide rebranded as DGI Clinical and Chere’s maritime roots pulled back to Nova Scotia to join the company as CEO. Building off the global trend toward patient-centered outcomes research, we narrowed our focus to products and services that facilitate the implementation of GAS in clinical development and evolved naturally into Ardea Outcomes.
With a team of world-class experts now spanning from Vancouver to Halifax, Ardea Outcomes now advises on Goal Attainment Scaling studies in multiple therapeutic areas from epilepsy to autism, hemophilia to rare oncology. Our early digital tools have matured into a robust digital GAS training program for clinicians, and GoalNav®, a flexible electronic data capture platform that walks clinicians and participants through the goal-setting and follow-up and centralized, hybrid, decentralized trials.
Still true to our roots, we’re encouraged by our progress, and remain passionate about a future where the patient voice is amplified with personalized research and care.
