This presentation provides an overview of administrative datasets available for researchers from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services. It highlights the enhanced value that data linkage adds to research using administrative data, leading to greater possibilities in answering a broader range of research questions. Issues around privacy and confidentiality are addressed. The current barriers and challenges around data linkages are explored.
The Victorian Data Linkages Unit (VDL) was established in 2009 with funding from the Australian and Victorian Governments as the Victorian node in the national Population Health Research Network (PHRN), to build a data linkage infrastructure capable of securely managing health information for health and medical research in Victoria. VDL has provided data linkage services to researchers to assist and improve evidence based policy and clinical practice development. In particular, it has developed a cancer related theme to support cancer research. It has had a big impact on the capability of the administrative data in assessing service performance and capturing patient pathways in the healthcare system.
VDL has developed sophisticated data linkage methods and strategies by using privacy preserving methods to link together records pertaining to the same individual within or across different administrative datasets. De-identification and encryption rules are applied to remove identifying information about patients, service providers and service dates.
We recognise the benefit of administrative data linkage as a resource for public good. However, we have identified the constraints that limit linkage of administrative data to other datasets pertaining to current legislative framework governing collection and disclosure of information, insufficient common identifiers across data collections, quality of data collections, and different perspectives of data custodians versus researchers. These issues are being addressed as a priority to meet the increasing demand for linked administrative data for medical and health research.