Examining changes in healthcare utilisation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and establishing the mechanism of access for future record-linked data projects
Project Details
Examining changes in healthcare utilisation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and establishing the mechanism of access for future record-linked data projects under the auspices of The University of Melbourne Centre for the Digital Translation of Health (CDTH).
Patron ID: PAT024
Project Lead:
Dr Daniel Capurro
Overview:
This project aims to utilise data mining techniques to map patterns and characteristics of primary care and hospital attendances prior, during and after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project aims to utilise hospitalisation data accessible via BioGrid Australia and record link this to Patron data with the linked dataset coming together in a University of Melbourne Secure Research Environment.
In summary:
1. GRHANITE record linkage technologies shall be utilised to generate record linkage ID numbers that match across the BioGrid datasets and Patron.
2. The HaBIC R2 Unit will create a Patron research dataset for this project containing these matching ID numbers
3. The researchers will be able to access the Patron dataset and the required BioGrid hospital emergency and admissions datasets from within the University of Melbourne controlled Secure Research Environment.
4. The researchers will be able to record-link the data for their research using the common record linkage ID numbers
5. The outcome of this project will be an understanding of which cohorts of patients or which conditions have had the greatest changes in healthcare utilisation before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
5. Based on the outcomes for this project, the researchers will generate additional hypotheses for research.
6. The researchers propose that these additional research questions be undertaken building on the analysis from the first project with each new research question being submitted to the Data Governance Committee with required ethics approvals.
Research Publications
Journal of Biomedical Infomatics 2022