Multimorbidity in patients attending 2 Australian primary care practices.

Purpose: Multiple chronic conditions in a single patient can be a challenging health burden. We aimed to examine patterns and prevalence of multimorbidity among patients attending 2 large Australian primary care practices and to estimate disease severity burden using the Cumulative Illness Rating Scale (CIRS).

Methods: Using published CIRS guidelines and a disease severity index calculated for each individual, we extracted data from the medical records of all 7,247 patients (58.