Monetizing the MoCa
The Montreal Cognitive Assessmenr certainly has received a lot of free publicity lately. Just sayin'. 
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jgs.16158
"In late June 2019, we learned that the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) would become proprietary in September. Users must be trained and certified for a fee of $125 and recertify every 2 years. Colleagues, especially those who experienced the privatization of the Mini‐Mental State Examination (MMSE) in 2000,1 have registered a range of reactions from resignation to anger and disgust. With its catchy name, visual appeal, and free download, the MoCA is the preferred cognitive mini‐battery for use in clinical care, training, and research, and it has found its way into a number of electronic medical record platforms.
Ziad Nasreddine, the MoCA's author and copyright holder, has created a company (MoCA Test Inc; www.mocatest.org) to manage certification, licensing, administration, scoring, and communication. Under the new requirements and subject to uncertain future iterations, users must register a unique profile, obtain consent, and enter selected patient data and test responses through an online portal for centralized scoring.2 In recent e‐mail exchanges, Nasreddine told us that his goals are to create an international database that may be shared with researchers and sold to commercial or other entities, and to support further development of the MoCA by user fees and other funding. We assume that patients will have to consent to the use of their clinically acquired data and that proxy consent will be needed when consent capacity is in question. These issues will discourage clinicians from routinely assessing cognition and create substantial inconvenience and potential legal challenges for healthcare systems choosing to retain access to the MoCA.
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Where do we go from here? Clinicians, academic institutions, and healthcare systems could, of course, choose to pay for training to use the MoCA. The process might improve reliability, as argued by its author (mocatest.org). The MoCA is, after all, a difficult test to give and score properly with heterogeneous patient populations in ordinary clinical settings where time and experience are at a premium. But what about the requirements to register as a user, obtain patient (and perhaps proxy) consent for each use, and share clinical data with a commercial entity? Although not unlawful, such a requirement feels vaguely exploitative. It creates, by design, a MoCA registry that can be used in ways that those who contribute to it have no rights to challenge or critique and from which there is no guarantee of benefit. Moreover, might such a required consent process undermine the comfort and trust we seek to establish when conducting a sensitive inquiry that is already potentially threatening to the patients we seek to help?"....(more at link)
