Mitigating climate-health inequities and building data-driven solutions towards personalised management for at-risk people with artificial intelligence and population-wide routinely-collected electronic health data in trusted research environments

Year of award: 2024

Grantholders

  • Dr Sara Khalid

    University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Project summary

Climate change is the biggest shared health challenge of the century. Extreme temperatures, which are becoming longer-lasting, more intense, and more frequent, are amongst the deadliest. Within the last decade extreme heat events have triggered public health red-alerts globally and in the UK. Societal impacts are unequal: while the elderly, pregnant women, and children are amongst the most vulnerable, outcomes can also vary by where someone lives, their monetary wealth, underlying health, genetics, and race/ethnicity. Existing health tools are not tailored to these interconnected risk-factors and can potentially mis-estimate individuals’ health risks. This study will focus on how to protect the health of those most vulnerable to extreme temperature events, using heat-related illness as an example. It will use large representative health records from different countries and climates to better understand disparities and build health-risk models, tailored to the most vulnerable. Studying de-identified data on patient-level risk-factors will enable calculation of risk-scores for individuals. Patients and public will guide the research including co-designed user-friendly openly-available outputs. Ultimately this work can guide healthcare providers and policymakers to adapt public health guidelines and target resource allocation where most needed and by the most vulnerable towards mitigating impacts of climate on everyone’s health.