LINKAGE AND CAPACITY BUILDING

Secondary use, including data linkage, of primary care datasets has the capacity to help researchers and policymakers better understand the patient journey through the health system.

However, the project-by-project nature of most ‘secondary use’ projects (using data for a purpose other than what it was originally collected for) means there is no national picture of what data are being used, where, by whom, how data are collected, to what level of granularity, nor the barriers to and benefits of its collection and use. This mixed methods study was part of a larger workplan of the Australian Health Research Alliance (AHRA); it aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the availability and secondary use of primary care data (primarily general practice data) across Australia and of what is required to build capacity for data-driven healthcare improvement.