What is Data for Decisions?

Data for Decision is a Department of General Practice and Primary Care, University of Melbourne research initiative that incorporates the Patron primary care data repository and accompanying program of research. Consenting primary care practices in Australia (currently mostly in Victoria), are invited to contribute de-identified data from electronic patient medical records for research purposes. GRHANITE® software is used to facilitate de-identified data transfer. The data is then curated and securely warehoused. A powerful feature of GRHANITE® is that it can facilitate data linkage between different de-identified datasets. This enables much greater insights into the patient-journey through the health system.

Researchers can apply to access subsets of data from the Patron data repository to answer certain research questions. The data is useful for epidemiological, public health and health economic studies, including around quality improvement, understanding long term medication effectiveness, prescribing and disease patterns.