An increasing number of people are living with multiple concurrent chronic conditions, known as multimorbidity. This is due to longer life expectancy, improved treatment options and increasingly complex disease trajectories. Most people with multimorbidity are managed in general practice.
The highly specialised healthcare system presents particular challenges for people with multimorbidity. Individual diseases are often managed according to specific clinical guidelines that do not always account for the patient’s overall health situation or treatment interactions. At the same time, there is limited evidence and few guidelines to support the management of multimorbidity as a complex clinical condition. This may result in fragmented and complex care pathways, making it challenging to provide coordinated and person-centred care.
General practice plays a central role in managing complex patient pathways, where physical, psychological and social factors are often closely interconnected. To strengthen our understanding of the treatment and prognosis of multimorbidity, research embedded in everyday clinical practice and grounded in comprehensive data is needed to generate clinically relevant knowledge.
The research group conducts mainly register-based research and has developed the Danish Multimorbidity Index. The index classifies 39 physical and mental health conditions and is used to investigate the prevalence, development and consequences of multimorbidity across both the primary and secondary healthcare sectors.
