CSIRO's HDI software links health data from many databases without revealing patient identities.
Positive health outcomes from better use of medical data
CSIRO e-health software brings together scattered medical data without revealing patient identities, greatly enhancing our ability to tackle disease and understand complex health issues.
- 7 July 2011 | Updated 14 October 2011
Australia has a rich collection of health and community data that could help us find answers to important health and social questions. However, patient data resides in many different, unconnected databases.
Accessing data from multiple databases typically involves significant time and manual handling. The data can be structured in different ways, written in different formats or have privacy settings that restrict release of the data.
Bringing data repositories together simply, quickly and securely would greatly enhance our ability to tackle diseases and understand complex issues.
CSIRO solution
Through the Australian e-Health Research Centre, CSIRO has developed the health data integration (HDI) tool which allows safe, secure integration of previously unlinkable data.
HDI uses sophisticated algorithms to match patient records across disparate sets of data. It then builds a virtual database with a metadata layer which is linked to terms from the international standard for clinical terminology, SNOMED CT. HDI also offers analysis of, and reporting on, that data.
The security and privacy of patient data is of paramount concern. Among several security features, HDI allows data custodians to specify in real-time how much of their data is available to a specific project, and in what format.
And, while HDI creates a virtual database, that data is not saved anywhere.
HDI allows construction of a complete picture of patient care and is an ideal tool for the creation of electronic health records.
Current activities
We are working on four main areas of HDI research:
- infrastructure facilities for publishing, locating, retrieving and analysing data in a large scale, diverse, distributed information system
- data linking, cleaning and management
- security and privacy
- online techniques allowing analysis and integration of the virtual databases.
Outcomes
HDI will lead to benefits for all Australians by enabling:
- policy makers in government to develop better forecasts on which to base health policies, plans and budgets, leading to better use of national health resources,
- the health research community to conduct more focused and relevant research
- provision of better health services.
HDI in use
HDI is currently used by:
- Flinders Medical Centre, to investigate progression of colorectal cancer
- Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, to provide access to clinical data for trials
- Gold Coast Hospital, to link ambulance and emergence department data sets to better understand the flow of patients.
Read more about Making electronic health records more accessible.
