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Opportunities to harmonise jurisdictional data and associated metadata – (Data Harmonisation Project)
The linked data available through PHRN is population-based health and other human services data mainly held by Australian, state and territory governments. Each jurisdiction now has at least 10 years of linked health data including births, deaths, hospital admissions, cancer registry and perinatal data. While some research is done using data from a single jurisdiction, there is increasing demand for data covering several jurisdictions.
The majority of jurisdictions now hold their core health data in a jurisdictional data warehouse. The challenge is that data in these jurisdictional warehouses and the related metadata are not harmonised. Each researcher accessing data from several warehouses has to spend considerable time in understanding and cleaning the data and a standard analytic query cannot be run across the warehouses.
This project investigated prevalence of jurisdictional data warehouses including future plans, established what data standards are being used in the warehouses and identified next steps for greater data harmonisation.
Project Status: Complete