Holly Tibble

Project: Medication non-adherence in asthma: data-driven approaches to understanding patient behaviour

PhD overview

PhD Title: Medication non-adherence in asthma: data-driven approaches to understanding patient behaviour

Funded by: Health Data Research UK

Supervisors: Professor Aziz Sheikh, Dr Athanasios Tsanas & Professor Robert Horne

Based at: University of Edinburgh

Email: Holly.tibble@ed.ac.uk

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Headshot of Holly Tibble
Former Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research PhD student Holly Tibble

Predicting asthma attacks enables health professionals to provide timely health education, such as asthma attack action plans and inhaler technique assessments, as well as to prompt further monitoring and pharmacological interventions. Previous attempts to construct data-driven risk prediction models of asthma attacks have lacked clinical utility: either producing inaccurate predictions or requiring patient data which are not cost-effective to collect on a large scale (such as electronic monitoring device data). Electronic Health Record (EHR) use throughout the UK enables researchers to harness comprehensive and panoramic patient data, but their cleaning and pre-processing requires sophisticated empirical experimentation and data analytics approaches. 

One factor contributing to excessive asthma morbidity and mortality is medication non-adherence: individuals not undergoing their treatment as prescribed. Estimating adherence from prescription records requires precise extraction of information from free-text data including dose directions. Furthermore, there are many approaches to measuring medication adherence from these processed EHRs, and appraising the best use-case for various methods is a core component of my research.  

About me

My research interests are prediction modelling, data linkage, and machine learning. 

Holly is now an Early Career Researcher within the Centre. 

Holly's Early Career Research profile

Publications

Acknowledgements

Funded by Health Data Research UK. This PhD is affiliated with the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research.