The NHS in North West London has been awarded £200,000 by Health Data Research UK (HDR-UK) and the Health Foundation to develop and trial digital tools to help prevent complications for people living with type 2 diabetes.
These tools will be used to pull together data from patient visits to various health professionals including GPs, nurses and A&E. The data gathered will capture information about the health and wellbeing of people with type 2 diabetes, such as their weight, sugar levels and diabetes medication.
The health information, which will have been consented for use by patients and GP practices, will be used to identify individuals most at risk of developing complications often experienced by people living with type 2 diabetes, this includes heart attack, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and amputations – a cost of £600 million a year to our local NHS.
The hope is that these new digital tools will take steps towards:
- Supporting clinicians to make better-informed health decisions when treating patients and supporting them to better self-manage their type 2 diabetes
- Providing more personalised care by ensuring increased support for people those who are at high risk of complications
- Reducing A&E and hospital admissions as a result of preventable complications and
- Reducing NHS spend.
Evidence demonstrates that through assessing the risk of complications and providing targeted and early interventions to those at highest risk of type 2 diabetes can reduce mortality, complications, and hospital admissions.
This project is led by the North West London Health and Care Partnership, in collaboration with the Institute of Global Health Innovation, MyWay Digital Health, Health Data Research UK, the Health Foundation, Imperial College Health Partners, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and AstraZeneca, and supported by HDRUK and the Health Foundation.
Doctor Tony Willis, project lead, GP and clinical director for diabetes for the North West London Health and Care Partnership said: “We are delighted about winning the HDR-UK and Health Foundation funding because it will allow us to continue innovating and driving forwards our work to improve outcomes for diabetes patients in North West London."
Caroline Cake, chief executive officer at Health Data Research UK added: “We are delighted to welcome this project to HDR-UK. It brings significant and demonstrable capabilities in using clinical data to transform the health and care of patients in North West London. The importance of this capability is evident in the context of COVID-19 and supports our mission to unite the UK’s health data to enable discoveries that will improve people’s lives.”
Adam Steventon, director of data analytics at the Health Foundation said: “We are excited to be partnering with HDR-UK to demonstrate how data and data-driven technologies can be harnessed to improve health and care. Through this work we aim to show how data-driven tools have the potential to improve health and care for everyone.”
If successful this tool could be expanded to help the NHS to treat and improve outcomes for patients with other long-term conditions including COPD and heart failure.
Historically health research has predominantly used data to look retrospectively. Through safe and secure gathering of health information we can now look ahead to identify new patterns in illnesses thus helping us to better manage many conditions and, in some cases, prevent them happening in the first place.
