A project team led by Professor Peter Bath from the University of Sheffield’s Healthy Lifespan Institute will use The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Development Award to establish the partnerships, infrastructure and information governance frameworks needed to underpin an Artificial Intelligence (AI) facility for analysing multiple long-term conditions and multimorbidity in South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw.
In the UK, more than three-fifths of those aged 65 and over have multimorbidity, the presence of two or more long term conditions. From the moment we are conceived there are factors that influence how we age. These include the social and economic environments we live and work in, as well as our individual biology and behaviour.
At the Healthy Lifespan Institute, our aim is to use AI approaches to identify and follow clusters of multimorbidity to improve the design, testing and selection of more effective ways to prevent it. The main implication and novelty of a cluster medicine approach is that instead of considering one cause – one treatment for one disease, it considers causes, and thus possible prevention and treatments, for the entire cluster of long term chronic conditions.
The initial grant funded work aims to develop the AI tool to identify and study clusters of multimorbidity within South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw, and look at the occurrence of these clusters within particular groups, such as those living in deprived areas vs affluent areas and BAME groups.
From February to October 2021, the research team will work with people with multimorbidity and the public, practitioners and policy makers from the NHS and local authorities to plan and develop the AI tool.
South Yorkshire (comprising Sheffield, Barnsley, Rotherham, Doncaster) and Bassetlaw has been identified as an ideal environment for examining relationships between multimorbidity, ethnicity and deprivation and includes areas of high affluence and severe deprivation.
It is hoped this work will lead to a larger grant application to NIHR for a Research Collaboration Grant (RCG) to develop the AI facility to further identify clusters and factors influencing the prevalence of multimorbidity in certain ethnic and socio-economic groups.
This award is just the start of our plans to use machine learning and data to help tackle multimorbidity in South Yorkshire. We hope the tool will help us identify causes of multimorbidity in different groups of people. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to collaborate with local health care providers and authorities to build a tool that will really benefit the people of South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw”
Professor Peter Bath
Professor of Health Informatics and Health Data Analytics at the University of Sheffield’s Information School and School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR)
For further information about the project and to become involved, please contact the project principal investigator, Professor Peter Bath at the University of Sheffield: nihraim@sheffield.ac.uk