Showing articles associated with Julia Hippisley-Cox
Julia Hippisley-Cox is a Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and General Practice, and remains an active GP with over two decades of experience at Woodstock Surgery, just outside of Oxford. She is also the Founder and Director of the QResearch and QSurveillance platforms, one of the world’s largest clinical datasets and a real time infectious disease surveillance system, respectively.
What is your main area(s) of interest/expertise?
I am Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and General Practice and an NHS GP. I have founded, designed and developed one of the world’s largest and richest medical research databases (called QResearch, www.qresearch.org). This database has anonymised data from over 35 million patients from primary care and is linked to hospital, cancer records and mortality data with data stretching over 25 or more years. We use these data to undertake research into patterns of disease and their treatments. I am especially interested in two areas (a) assessing the safety and unintended effects of commonly used medicines and (b) the development, validation and implementation of risk prediction tools to help assess an individual’s risk of various diseases and the risks and benefits of treatments so that we can give individuals better information on which to base decisions regarding their health. A good example of this is the QRISK tool (www.qrisk.org) which is widely used in the NHS to assess the risk of getting a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years so we can then offer the patient interventions to reduce their risk.
What are you working on right now?
We have many research projects underway including research to help diagnose serious illnesses earlier in the GP surgery (e.g. motor neurone disease and cancer). Right now we are embarking on urgent research to better understand COVID-19, which patients are at highest risk of getting this new disease and what factors are associated with having it particularly severely – particularly anything which we might be able to change to lower that risk. We are using QResearch to investigate a range of medicines which might increase risk of severe COVID-19 disease as well as any which may have a beneficial effect and hence be suitable for testing in a clinical trial. The QResearch database will also help us identify any indirect impacts of COVID-19 on the health service – for example, to look at delays in diagnoses or treatment of other conditions such as heart disease and cancer.
Why is Oxford a good place to work in this field of research?
Oxford aims to lead the world in research and has an incredible depth and breadth of research expertise. It has so many world class scientists keen to collaborate and share their knowledge and expertise. Innovation often happens at the boundaries between different disciplines and the Oxford environment naturally enables cross-disciplinary research with clinicians, pharmacists, statisticians, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians and many other groups.
Find out more about Julia Hippisley-Cox: https://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/team/julia-hippisley-cox
