Benefits of data linkage

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Benefits of data linkage
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Benefits of data linkage

• Social Benefits
• Prevention of birth defects and other health
  benefits of folate in pregnancy and childhood
• Safety and Quality of Surgical Care Program , WA
  Audit of Surgical Mortality, Duty to Care study
  reducing preventable deaths from surgical errors
  which has led to legislative reforms and early
  intervention programs.
• Clinical studies where the public have been given
  better information to make decisions about their
  health include gall-bladder surgery, cancer
  surgery, operations on major blood vessels,
  treatment regimes for illicit drug addicts,
  life-saving road crash prevention strategies and
  the worlds most accurate assessment of the risk
  of blood clots in airline passengers on long-haul
  flights.

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Benefits of data linkage

• Scientific benefits
• The WADLS has supported over 300 distinct
  research studies of causes of disease, clinical
  needs analysis, patterns and costs of care, and
  outcomes of health services over 300
  scientificjournal publications and over 40
  higher research degrees, completed or in
  progress.
• It has also provided a basis for many
  health-related project, program and capacity
  building grants for WA during the last ten years
  and has generated innovative inter-sectoral
  research collaborations using links between
  healthoutcomes and data sets arising from the
  education, community services, policing and
  justice sectors.

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Benefits of data linkage

• Privacy benefits
• The public is increasingly concerned about the
  protection of privacy, established data linkage
  protocols shows how the combination of smart
  computing technology and strictly policed best
  practice procedures enable both privacy and
  research advocates to achieve their seemingly
  their objectives.
• Data linkage removes personal details from data
  before they are given to researchers for
  analysis.
• The hard facts are that in WA, research projects
  using named data have fallen from gt90 prior to
  data linkage to 36 in 2003

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Benefits of data linkage

• Economic benefits
• Income to WA from research grants from 1995 to
  June 2004 based on the use of the WADLS was 58.4
  million (including three NHMRC program grants
  valued at 16Million). The return on WAs
  investment in data linkage to that date was
  gt1,000.
• Research grants attracted to WA by the data
  linkage facilities show many markers of
  scientific excellence, an extended NHMRC project
  grant valued at 1 million assigned NHMRCs
  perfect score of Australias first NHMRC
  Population Health Research Capacity Building
  Grant of 3 million two NHMRC enabling grants of
  almost 4 million and two grants from the US
  National Institutes of Health valued at 3.5
  million.
• It has also formed the basis to establish two
  state-based centres of excellence Data Linkage
  Australia has already been mentioned and the
  second has been a Centre for Excellence in
  Alzheimers Disease Research.

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Benefits of data linkage

• Future benefits
• The possible availability of the Commonwealth
  Medical Benefits Scheme (MBS), Pharmaceutical
  Benefits Scheme (PBS) and aged care data, and the
  extension of the system to include genealogical
  links, portends a medium-term future in which a
  number of particularly significant developments
  will become possible.
• These include a systematic approach to
  post-marketing vigilance of adverse drug
  reactions and linkage infrastructure that will
  attract international investment in Australian
  research in the fields of pharmaco-epidemiology,
  pharmaco-economics and pharmaco-genomics
• opportunities for unprecedented levels of
  collaboration between biomedical, clinical and
  population health researchers research into the
  effectiveness of Australias massive investment
  into a reform agenda for primary medical care
  services and an evidence base for healthy ageing
  and national aged care policy.