Focusing on polypharmacy and mental health
GCRF Funding Cycle
2019-20
Principal Investigator
Dr Juliana Bowles
Schools
Computer Science
ODA countries
Brazil
The Brazilian healthcare system faces major challenges as the population grows and ages, and the systems, put in place to manage patients with more than one chronic medical condition (multimorbidity), struggle to accommodate growing demands.
Three major issues in Brazilian healthcare are: multimorbidity and poor communication in healthcare leading to polypharmacy complications; lack of consistency of treatment across regional boundaries; difficulties in bringing better quality and consistent healthcare into poorer communities, especially in relation to mental health provision.
It is important to engage a full range of healthcare professionals, patients, carers, funders and government decision makers in addressing the challenges faced by the healthcare system. Only then will it be possible to understand and address the context of regional problems and extrapolate this, using appropriate technology in conjunction with new policy and infrastructure, to achieve a country-wide solution.
We have presented some of the research we are involved in and are currently discussing ways of integrating some of our solutions in smaller use cases with local hospitals in Sao Paulo in the first instance. The project is described in our website.