Grant: Operating Grant

Many people have multiple chronic health conditions, which is termed multimorbidity. It is clear that multimorbidity is common and is associated with worse clinical outcomes and higher health care costs, compared to good health or to the presence of a single chronic condition. However, there are major knowledge gaps about how common multimorbidity is in Canada today, and about which individual conditions make the most important contributions to the overall health and economic burden of multimorbidity. Doctors and policy-makers need this information to help design health systems that effectively deal with the epidemic of chronic disease generally and multimorbidity specifically. The current proposal describes a novel collaboration between health services researchers, primary care physicians, and policy-makers responsible for Alberta's chronic disease programs. We will use a unique database of all 4 million adults insured by the Alberta provincial health ministry between 1997 and 2011. We will identify people with multimorbidity (2 or more of chronic conditions) and measure certain health outcomes and health expenditures for people with and without multimorbidity. We will also measure how common multimorbidity is overall, and how rapidly the number of people with multimorbidity is increasing. We have a strong research team, and are experienced with using these data. To ensure that our research is most useful to decision-makers, we have designed the study together with help from national and provincial policymakers were responsible for the care of people with chronic diseases. We believe that our findings will be useful to all people who are responsible for the care of people with chronic disease. The findings will also help researchers to develop future studies that improve the care of people with multimorbidity.