Dr Alex Bottle

I am a lecturer in medical statistics and the chief analyst within the Dr Foster Unit. My main research interests are indicator development, risk adjustment and statistical process control methods for fairer comparison of healthcare provider performance and hospital quality improvement projects.

On post-doctoral secondment to the Shipman public inquiry, I investigated statistical process control methods for identifying practices with unusual mortality rates. I combined these with my interest in risk adjustment and experience in handling administrative data sets in devising the statistical methodology behind Dr Foster Intelligence’s (DFI) national Real Time Monitoring system. This system tracks patient outcomes by hospital for over 200 patient groups using routine data. It is widely used in the NHS in England and Holland.

My research interests are focused on using routinely collected data to explore variations in health service quality and safety with the aim of improving patient care, and include the following current projects (amongst others): 

1. NIHR-funded project (as PI, with Dr Giovanni Montana at IC and Prof Simon Jones at Surrey): use of comorbidity measures and comparison of machine learning methods in casemix adjustment models
2. Global Comparators (run by DFI since 2010): use of administrative data from leading hospitals in five countries to compare and improve outcomes
3. Imperial Patient Experience Research Centre (led by Prof Helen Ward): assessment of hospital patient experience data for improving care
4. Analysis of effect on outcomes of pre-operative risk factors (with Dr Rob Sanders): e.g. prior admission for AMI or stroke for elective surgery
5. Indicators in GI surgery (with the St Mary's group led by Mr Omar Faiz): the introduction of laparoscopy, volume-outcome relation and failure to rescue
6. Use of SPC in quality improvement in anaesthetics (led by Dr Jon Benn at the CPSSQ): evaluating the feedback of performance data to clinicians in real clinical setting

I teach statistics and critical appraisal of literature on undergraduate and postgraduate taught courses and supervise a number of PhD students.

Potential research students interested in any of the above projects or related subjects are welcome to contact me informally at robert.bottle@imperial.ac.uk.