A new scientific study developed by Hospital da Luz Learning Health, a partner of the Católica-Luz Clinical Academic Centre, has been published in BMC Health Services Research. The article, entitled “Multimorbidity measurement strategies for predicting hospital visits”, addresses one of the major challenges currently facing healthcare systems: understanding and measuring multimorbidity to better anticipate hospital use.
The study analyses 15 years of electronic health record data from Hospital da Luz Lisboa, covering more than 925,000 patients and 9.7 million healthcare episodes. By comparing different approaches to measuring multimorbidity, the authors assess how these strategies perform in predicting future hospital visits using real-world clinical data.
This work explores multiple clinical phenotyping methods and multimorbidity indices, highlighting how the choice of measurement approach can influence risk stratification and healthcare planning.
The study was carried out in collaboration with INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, within the scope of the intelligentCare project (CMU-Portugal), reflecting the value of strong partnerships between clinical institutions and academia and the authors of the study are Bernardo Neves (Internal Medicine and Data Science, Hospital da Luz), José Maria Moreira, Simão Gonçalves, Jorge Cerejo and Inês Mota (Data Scientists, Hospital da Luz Learning Health), Nuno André da Silva (Deputy Director for Innovation and Data Science, Hospital da Luz Learning Health), Francisca Leite (Executive Director, Hospital da Luz Learning Health), and Mário Gaspar da Silva (Full Professor and Researcher, Instituto Superior Técnico and INESC-ID).
CAC-CL warmly congratulates all the authors on this outstanding scientific achievement. This work exemplifies how collaborative research can generate robust evidence with direct relevance for clinical decision-making, health system planning and the future of data-driven healthcare!