Multimorbidity refers to the occurrence of two or more medical problems at the same time. Multimorbidity is highly prevalent and may have serious consequences for quality of life. However, there is a dearth of public resources on managing multimorbidity and there is no central, public multimorbidity research centre for stakeholders to engage with.
In this proposal, we set out three separate but related activities, all of which will promote knowledge exchange and dissemination of findings to a broad audience. (1) Our main KEDS activity will be to develop a multimorbidity research platform that will engage all multimorbidity stakeholders. The platform will be developed by the KEDS-employed computer programmer and will be hosted online and made publicly available. It will contain general information and research findings on multimorbidity and free digitised interventions and materials developed from our multimorbidity research work. The platform will also contain digitised tools developed for health care professionals, such as our Multimorbidity Checklist. (2) The platform will host a data repository for researchers in multimorbidity, so there will be a multimorbidity data bank for future use. The CLARITY database will be uploaded to the new repository. (3) We will expand on our original plan of developing an e-Health training course to developing an online course so to reach as wide an audience as possible. To facilitate the progression of these activities, we will hire a computer programmer and also create a collaboration with a dedicated computer science research group.