New £3.4m health data initiative to address major health challenges

Health Innovation North West Coast is a partner in a £3.4m innovative data initiative in the North of England which will benefit patients nationally and help to address major health challenges.

The initiative is led by the University of Liverpool, with £1.2m investment from Health Data Research (HDR) UK and £2.2m from partner institutions.

The Better Care North Partnership (HDR UK North) initiative aims to improve the care and services for patients by supporting the better use of data and analytical tools and includes projects that aim to benefit some of the most vulnerable patient groups who are at greatest risk of COVID-19.

Growing impact of an ageing population

One of the major challenges for the partnership is addressing the issue of frailty, an area of unmet clinical and social care need that affects 10 per cent of people aged over 65, rising to 25-50 per cent of people aged over 85 years. This accounts for £15 billion of expenditure in the UK and is likely to have a growing impact due to the ageing UK population.  

The partnership will initially focus on improving monitoring of residents in care homes to detect deterioration, reducing the burden of use of anticholinergic medicines, and optimising prescribing of antibiotics, thereby reducing the potential for antimicrobial resistance.

Innovation Agency Chief Executive Dr Liz Mear said:

“We are delighted to be a partner in this programme as it addresses two very important challenges - antimicrobial resistance and deterioration of residents in care homes.  The project builds on our successful track record with partners across the North and our current work in care homes in the North West Coast region.”

Fifteen organisations from across the North are involved in the partnership which will be co-ordinated by a team of researchers from the University of Liverpool led by Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, the David Weatherall Chair of Medicine, NHS Chair of Pharmacogenetics at the University of Liverpool, Director of the MRC Centre for Drug Safety Science and Wolfson Centre for Personalised Medicine.

In addition to The Better Care North Partnership, HDR is also establishing another health data research partnership in the south-west of England, co-ordinated by the University of Bristol. Both will form part of HDR UK’s network of research sites and hubs, which bring together world-class research and innovation expertise, a track record in using health data to derive new knowledge and scientific discovery and enable the responsible use of data to speed up benefits to patients and the population.

Multidisciplinary world-leading expertise

Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, said:

“This partnership brings together world-class universities, digitally enabled NHS institutions and academic health science systems. The is underpinned by multidisciplinary world-leading expertise in population-based learning health systems research and a history of collaborative working, to address major challenges in frailty, an area of unmet medical and social care need.

We serve over 16 million people in the North where the rates of poverty, morbidity, premature mortality and poorer clinical outcomes are higher than in other regions. As our population gets older, frailty and more widely, multimorbidity, exert huge system pressures.

This partnership will help us to use all available data and advanced analytical techniques to gain actionable insights for optimising delivery of care for those who need it most.”

Opportunity

Professor Simon Ball, Medical Director at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and Research Director at Health Data Research UK, said:

“As healthcare professionals we make hundreds of decisions a week with our patients. In doing so we aim to decide what will work best for each individual. Electronic healthcare records offer the opportunity to combine patients’ data with information on best practice, so that we can reliably deliver high quality care in complex settings and pressured environments. Beyond that we can use the resulting data on patients’ outcomes and experience, to continuously learn from, and improve on, everyday practice in ways that are applicable across the NHS.”

The following organisations are members of The Better Care North Partnership; Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, Lancaster University, The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, University of Leeds, Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Trust, University of Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trusts, Newcastle University, Salford Royal Foundation Trust, University of Sheffield, South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Integrated Care System and Wirral University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

The partners also include the four Northern Academic Health Science Networks - Innovation Agency for the North West Coast of England, AHSN North East and North Cumbria, Yorkshire and Humber AHSN and Health Innovation Manchester; and researchers from Durham University.

The Northern Health Science Alliance, an alliance of 24 universities, NHS trusts and Academic Health Science Networks across the North of England, supported the bid through project management across a broad coalition of partners and in engagement with the NHS.