Learning Health System

High asthma rates

The UK has amongst the highest asthma rates in the world, as well as some of the poorest health outcomes from asthma.

What are we doing about it?

To help address this, we plan to develop a Learning Health System (LHS) for asthma.

The LHS will allow real-time access to, and interrogation of, a wide range of data sources to provide tailored feedback to health care professionals in a format that they can readily action.

We will make use of the UK’s rich electronic general practice data, linking this with data on community prescribing, NHS 24 use, A&E attendance, hospital admission/mortality, and more widely with data on education, pollution/weather, and census data.

We will evaluate how well general practices are performing according to national recommendations for quality of asthma care, and feedback our findings on a continuous basis to enhance improvements in asthma care.

Our ultimate goal is to create a continuous monitoring system that will enable general practitioners, patients, policymakers, and asthma investigators to appraise, in real-time, the progress being made in improving the quality of asthma care.