Summary
Thomas is a GP and Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Primary Care and Public Health and Department of Mathematics. He is currently completing a PhD exploring patterns of multimorbidity, funded by the Wellcome Trust 4i programme at Imperial.
Thomas’ PhD aims to identify whether characterising groups of commonly occurring diseases as more than the sum of their parts can provide actionable insights to improve patient care. This brings together his clinical interests in chronic disease management and patients’ interactions with health services, as well as his expertise in applying statistical and machine learning approaches to big data. The PhD aims to develop natural language processing methods to define ‘clusters’ of long-term conditions based not only on what conditions someone has, but how they develop over time. Thomas is supervised by Professors Aylin, Barahona and Majeed, and Dr Woodcock and Dr Clarke.
Before starting his PhD, Thomas was deputy theme lead for Digital Health in the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Northwest London and Clinical Research Fellow in the NIHR Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, working on an evaluation of the COVID Oximetry @home programme. Thomas has several ongoing projects in digital health, including working with partners across London on evaluating the impact of remote consultations during the pandemic on patients and staff.
Thomas completed clinical training as an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow at Imperial in 2021. During his training, he worked in a variety of primary and secondary care roles, and for organisations including NHS England, Public Health England and the King’s Fund. In 2015 he was awarded an NIHR Research Methods scholarship to complete an MSc in Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, graduating with Distinction.
Thomas has a wide range of research interests, including health systems research, digital health, epidemiology and global health. Since 2017, he has been co-lead investigator and lead statistician for May Measurement Month (MMM), a global blood pressure awareness and screening campaign, which to date has screened over 4 million people worldwide. He has supervised a number of BSc, MSc, MPH and visiting students on dissertations and continues an active involvement in teaching.
Publications
Journals
Beaney T, Clarke J, Salman D, et al., 2024, Assigning disease clusters to people: a cohort study of the implications for understanding health outcomes in people with Multiple Long-Term Conditions, Journal of Multimorbidity and Comorbidity
GBD 2021 Demographics Collaborators, 2024, Global age-sex-specific mortality, life expectancy, and population estimates in 204 countries and territories and 811 subnational locations, 1950-2021, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021, The Lancet, ISSN:0140-6736
Beaney T, 2024, Is consensus attainable on the definition of multiple long term conditions?, Bmj, Vol:384
Beaney T, Clarke J, Woodcock T, et al., 2024, Effect of timeframes to define long term conditions and sociodemographic factors on prevalence of multimorbidity using disease code frequency in primary care electronic health records: retrospective study, Bmj Medicine, Vol:3, ISSN:2754-0413
Jain V, Kerr G, Beaney T, 2024, The impact of the 2022 spring COVID-19 booster vaccination programme on hospital occupancy in England: An interrupted time series analysis., Plos Glob Public Health, Vol:4