Abstract

In the pursuit of sustainable research practices, the health research community faces a pressing need to maximise the impact of valuable data generated through clinical trials and health studies. While data sharing and reuse offer significant scientific, economic, and ethical advantages, complex challenges often impede these practices in Australia.

The Melbourne Academic Centre for Health (MACH) Node, a joint venture between Victoria's healthcare providers, medical research institutes, and universities, is part of a national effort to address these challenges. In collaboration with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), the Consortium has developed Health Data Australia, a national platform that facilitates the discovery, access, sharing, and reuse of health and medical research data. By unlocking the potential of existing research data, Health Data Australia promotes research efficiency, reduces waste, fosters collaboration, and creates opportunities to address new research questions – key tenets of sustainable research practices.

At its core, the platform features a centralised catalogue of clinical trial metadata, enabling secondary researchers to explore and assess the relevance of available datasets to their research objectives. This streamlined process facilitates data sharing requests from primary researchers, fostering collaborative efforts and minimising duplicative work within the research community, thereby optimising resource utilisation.

This presentation will focus on the development of Health Data Australia, encompassing three essential elements: infrastructure, data development, and culture and policy development. Insights into the co-design and development process of this platform will be provided, highlighting the key priorities that guided its creation.

Participants will explore the significant benefits of data sharing and reuse in health research. Moreover, the presentation will underscore the importance of centralised data catalogues and streamlined processes for facilitating data sharing requests, as demonstrated by the features of Health Data Australia.

Additionally, this presentation will explore the role of the Methods and Implementation Support for Clinical and Health (MISCH) research hub within the University of Melbourne and how multidisciplinary collaborative research hubs are ideally positioned to create an environment that drives high-quality research and translation while maximizing efficient resource utilization.