Project Lead: Dr Beatrice Alex

People in the UK are living longer, and more people now live with multiple conditions. Healthcare focuses on single diseases, and is often not good at dealing with many of the common problems of later life. For example, there are many reasons that people fall or get confused or have problems with their bowels or bladder. In electronic health records, these problems are almost always documented in ‘free-text’ (ie the typed notes that doctors or nurses make). Identifying who has this type of problem is therefore difficult because different doctors or nurses will use different words to describe them (‘confused’, ‘mixed-up’, ‘delirious’, ‘not themselves’, ‘cognitively impaired’). We will use data science methods that can automatically turn free-text into carefully-defined categories (eg all of the words in the last brackets are ‘delirium’). This will support research to understand how common these problems are and what causes them, and healthcare improvements.

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