Professor John Ainsworth and The Digital Health Software (DHS) team, from the Centre for Health Informatics, are part of a successful consortium who have secured EURO 6 Million funding award from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme for the AFFIRMO (atrial fibrillation integrated approach in frail, multimorbid and polymedicated older people) project. This project will examine ways of optimising care and self-management for individuals in the geriatric population with multiple morbidities, one of which is atrial fibrillation.
AFFIRMO aims to identify different clusters of multimorbidity, assess the needs of patients, caregivers, and health professionals, and to examine ways of optimising care and self-management. AFFIRMO will develop, implement and test the effectiveness of a patient-centered approach on the population in clinical practice.
Professor John Ainsworth has extensive experience of developing digital health interventions from initial inception right through to full implementation within the NHS and will lead the work being carried out in Manchester. The DHS team of research software engineers, designers, and project and programme managers will be responsible for developing an ambitious web and mobile digital platform that forms part of an interoperable care framework that can facilitate the application of this personalised care pathway. The platform will bridge primary and secondary care will be used across six countries (Denmark, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia) and will be available in multiple languages. This complex platform will require all of the team’s specialist knowledge in health informatics, delivery of evidence-based mobile and web platforms and medical devices.
Professor Ainsworth explained that “A single-disease approach with fragmented care is still prevalent in healthcare systems, yet in older age patients multi-morbidity is common. This funding will enable us to develop patient centred digital interventions and enhanced care pathways for the management of multi-morbid older patients where Atrial Fibrillation is present.”
The project will conclude with a subgroup analyses of differences on outcomes of in relation to gender and social inequalities.
The AFFIRMO project is led by Professor Søren Paaske Johnsen of Aalborg Universitet and includes no fewer than 20 partners. AFFIRMO begins in May 2021 and runs for 5 years.
About the team
John Ainsworth is Professor of Health Informatics, University of Manchester and the head of the Centre for Health Informatics. The Centre conducts world leading research into health informatics and digital health technologies, and forms a centre of excellence in digital health innovation.
Digital Health Software is a specialist team of digital health researchers, research software engineers, designers and project managers based at the University of Manchester. They have extensive expertise in the development of digital health interventions such as smartphone apps, databases and web interfaces.