Predicting rehabilitation needs and trajectories in older patients

An ageing population is a major success of modern healthcare, but this challenges the NHS to better support an increasingly frail hospital population. One third of older people acquire new disability by discharge, leaving hospital with less independence than before getting ill. Rehabilitation attempts to maximise recovery, but this is not well targeted to people at highest risk of disability, as the risk factors are not well understood. However, electronic health records now routinely hold information about rehabilitation progress. In this project, we will use methods like machine learning to find patterns from previous admissions of older patients. The aim is to build a tool that uses data to predict the rehabilitation needs of an older patient at the point of hospital admission, and display this in an understandable way for healthcare professionals and patients themselves. A future trial could then test this tool to help target hospital rehabilitation better.