Around one in four adults in England, which equates to more than fourteen million people, are now living with two or more health conditions. People with multiple conditions have poorer quality of life and a higher mortality risk. Some combinations are associated with especially poor outcomes; people with severe mental illness live 10 to 20 years less than the general population. People’s problems do not fit neatly into the way the current service is configured. This is particularly an issue in relation to prescribing, where there is frequently little integration across co-existing diseases and polypharmacy can easily result. The intelligent use of data could provide solutions to this growing problem in the NHS.
Chair: Prof Tony Avery
Professor of primary care, Nottingham and national clinical director prescribing, NHS England
Prof Michael Barnes
Professor of bioinformatics and director of the Centre for Translational Bioinformatics, Queen Mary University of London
Dr Lauren Walker
Senior clinical lecturer in clinical pharmacology and therapeutics and internal medicine, Pharmacology & Therapeutics, University of Liverpool
Dr Lauren Walker is Reader in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics and Honorary Consultant in General Internal Medicine. She co-leads the DynAIRx programme, funded by the NIHR AI in multimorbidity stream and her research interest involves utilising existing health record data to understand how multiple long-term conditions, and their associated prescriptions, evolve over time and how these relationships between drugs and diseases lead to harm. She is also the Academic Director at the NIHR Clinical Research Facility at Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and co-director of the Liverpool Early Phase Hub at the University of Liverpool.
Prof Krish Nirantharakumar
Professor of health data science and public health, University of Birmingham
Krish Nirantharakumar, Lauren Walker, Michael Barnes, Tony Avery
