In September 2018 BioGrid Australia (BioGrid) contracted with the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (VCCC) and the University of Melbourne to build a data platform for health services research leveraging off BioGrid’s established national federated data connectivity platform. This program, one of 19 programs, has been funded by the Victorian Government as part of the VCCC Strategic Research Plan 2017-2020.

Led by Principal Investigator Professor Jon Emery this program aims to establish a Data-Driven Research Hub leveraging existing electronic health data including:

• Administrative (episode) data in electronic form and record-linkable at the patient level in VCCC hospitals.
• Rich and deep clinical, costing and other clinical registry data from the VCCC hospitals.
• Definitive diagnosis data (that enables identification of cancer patients within VCCC hospital data through patient-level record linkage without relying on ICD codes from hospital datasets) within the Victorian Cancer Registry dataset.
• Existing linkage to National Death Index data (which provides important patient outcome data that is not always readily available to clinicians and researchers)
• Existing record-linkable dataset from over 500 Victorian General Practices representing over 2 million patients contributed by the National Prescribing Service (NPS).

Until recently, it has not been possible to extract detailed data from primary care; therefore care given to cancer patients by General Practitioners and other primary care health professionals has been invisible to health services research that seeks to improve evidence-based and cost-effective care.

BioGrid is part way through a two year program and currently deep into phase 1 of the Data-Driven Research Hub project, with some linked Admitted and Emergency hospital data being available, working with selected hospitals to complete linkage for phase 1. In addition, BioGrid is currently reviewing some of the phase 2 data sets, in particular the Victorian Integrated Non-Admitted Health (VINAH) – also known as outpatients’ data and Administrative costings datasets, with selected hospitals.

Although not all VCCC hospitals are currently linked there are projects that are currently accessing and analysing data through the BioGrid Access Request System. Some preliminary analysis of linkage between the NPS MedicineInsight Primary Care data and a sample of Hospital administrative data from Melbourne Health and Western Health has been completed. It was seen that 18% of patients from NPS who had at least 1 encounter from Jan 2006 to Dec 2016, had a linked record in either hospitals administrative data. Seventeen percent of patients from NPS who were considered active from 2016, had a linked record in either hospitals administrative data.

For further information about this innovative program, contact either Chris Kearney, Program Manager, VCCC Data-Driven Research Hub, or Ping-wen Lee, BioGrid Australia.