Better health outcomes for individuals and communities are the end goals of a major collaboration to establish Australia’s Population Health Research Network.

Consisting of nodes distributed throughout Australia, the Population Health Research Network (PHRN) will provide Australian health researchers with high-tech health data linkage facilities and services.

But why is it important to efficiently link health data?

“Because all too often health policy is formed on an ad hoc basis to meet deadlines, without high-quality data to support the policy or expenditure,” said Curtin’s Professor of Health Services Research, James Semmens.

“Health researchers know that collated health data has been under-utilised. This affects health policy, the provision of health services and individual health outcomes.”

The Commonwealth Government has responded to the need and is providing $20 million for the PHRN, supplemented by a further $31.7 million from state governments and academic institutions, via the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy program. Curtin has been provided with a budget of $3.6 million over a four-year period to establish and run the network’s Centre for Data Linkage (CDL).

The CDL will comprise a secure data linkage facility that links Commonwealth and jurisdictional datasets – and between those datasets and research datasets – using demographic data. The CDL will collate jurisdictional linkages into a national system, and assist with the delivery of linkable data to health researchers.

“The responsibility reflects our success with the WA Record Linkage Project and the Data Linkage Australia Centre of Excellence (WA) over the past 15 years. Security and privacy of data is a priority for the project, which will institute WA’s best practice protocols and block requests for identified data,” Semmens said.

“It’s important to understand the CDL won’t hold the datasets, but will link the demographic data that has been separated from the remainder of each dataset to create ‘linkage keys’.

“Such complex integration of health data sets is enabled by the technological advancements that have paved the way for this project.”

During the next six months, a number of international researchers will arrive in Perth to help establish the CDL and coordinate the essential infrastructure for maximising data linkage. The executive team currently includes Professor Christine O’Keefe, who has been seconded from CSIRO; James Boyd, who has been central to the development of the Scottish Record Linkage Project; and Anna Ferrante, seconded from The University of Western Australia and who has been responsible for the development of the WA Crime Research Database.

“The CDL team will also have a vital research role in the development of better data linkage systems and methods. And a key part of that will be the evaluation and quality assurance of new linkage systems and methods,” Semmens said.

“I anticipate that the PHRN will transform the way that taxpayer funds are spent on public health. So, returning to a point I’ve made before, I don’t think we should be asking whether it’s ethical to do data linkage; the question is whether it’s ethical not to.”

healthsciences.curtin.edu.au/research