‘Patients today experience a healthcare system that examines and treats each individual disease separately and does not focus on the whole patient. It’s a big problem for the many patients who have multiple diseases at the same time. There will be many more of them in the future, and this poses a major problem for our healthcare system’, says Professor Søren Paaske Johnsen from the Department of Clinical Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, Aalborg University (AAU). Together with Professor Gregory Lip from AAU and the University of Liverpool, he is leading a new large European research project that intends to find solutions to this problem.

‘We understand and treat patients better if we look at them from a holistic perspective and see them as human beings with coherent systems of diseases. Otherwise, we simply miss the big picture. But it’s a difficult challenge to get the entire healthcare system to organise treatments that match this perspective. It means that we must move away from a 'one size fits all' approach and instead focus on the patients' individual situation and actively involve each patient in decisions about the organisation of treatment. This is the great challenge we will address with this project.’

A problem of epidemic size

In the future, the group of older patients with multiple diseases will be much larger as life expectancy increases in most countries. ‘It challenges healthcare systems all over the world’, says Søren Paaske Johnsen.

‘We often see quite complex disease courses. Because patients have multiple diseases at the same time, they are given several different medicinal preparations. They may also have a combination of both physical and mental illness. They are more fragile due to their advanced age, and moreover, their life circumstances can further complicate their situation. Such complex disease situations are similarly complicated for a healthcare system to handle’, says Søren Paaske Johnsen and continues:

‘A group of patients who often have multiple diseases at the same time are patients with heart fibrillation. By 2050, it is expected that we will have between 14 and 17 million patients with heart fibrillation in Europe. So we are facing a challenge of epidemic size that we need to figure out how to deal with appropriately.’

Disciplines and countries join forces

The research project is carried out jointly by a large number of partners, and many European countries each participate with their own expertise.

‘At the Faculty of Medicine at Aalborg University, we have extensive experience of how to use digitalisation opportunities to gather valuable knowledge about patients and apply the enormous amount of data to see the big picture and make better treatment choices to serve the good of all. This is an essential part of our contribution to the project’, says Søren Paaske Johnsen.

Contact

Strategic Advisor Lone Bechmann, the Faculty of Medicine, Aalborg University, lbec@adm.aau.dk