Understanding and predicting mortality and significant events in later life using routinely collected data

People in the UK are living longer, but many older people have multiple health problems. The NHS and local authorities do not always provide joined-up or effective care to older people. Ensuring that care is targeted at those with the highest need is difficult. Ideally, we would provide preventive care to maximise people’s future independence, but that means we need to be able to identify the people most likely to lose their independence.

The aim of this project is to develop and test tools for predicting who is most likely to lose their independence or have other adverse outcomes. We will do this using information recorded electronically in hospital records. In future we would like to add in GP and local authority records to add more depth to our analysis. All the information we use will be pseudonymised (i.e. have names and similar information removed), kept secure and will not be used in individual patient care. The prediction tools we develop in this project will help us target care to those who most need it.