26 October 2023
On 23 October 2023, Health Translation Queensland (HTQ) officially launched the Health Studies Australian National Data Asset (HeSANDA) Queensland node – a statewide online catalogue that curates, stores and enables the sharing of health research data generated by the Queensland research community.
More than 300 members from the health research community across Australia joined the launch event to celebrate and learn the how and why of sharing and reusing health research data.
“The Queensland node better equips and empowers Queensland's health research community by facilitating the access, sharing and reuse of data, ultimately advancing research efforts and improving health outcomes”, said HTQ Executive Director Professor John Prins.
“We encourage Queensland researchers to start sharing information about their health research data via the Queensland node, making it discoverable through the node and Health Data Australia which means streamlining efforts, aligning approaches and building national data sharing capability,” said Professor Prins.
HTQ with its 13 partner organisations bringing together universities, research institutes and health services plays a vital role in driving collaboration across disciplines and institutions.
“The HeSANDA initiative and our Queensland node are a prime example of such collaboration in the field of health data science which is an emerging discipline of enormous value,” said Professor Prins.
The keynote speaker at the Queensland node launch, Professor Andrew Morris, Director at Health Data Research UK, provided valuable insights into how his organisation established an integrated systematic approach to building health research data infrastructure in the UK, gearing an entire country towards health data science.
At the event he encouraged the research community to be “bold and ambitious” as “digitisation is here to stay” – as he pointed to the importance of collaboration, coordination and connectivity when it comes to health data by quoting a Wallstreet Journal headline ‘The new Einsteins will be scientists who share’.
“The opportunity now is to collaborate at scale, to forge a convergence of [clinical] care and research by creating real-time intelligence across the entire population of Queensland. I think you’ve got the people, the skills, and the vision to achieve that,” said Professor Morris.
Other speakers included Dr Kristan Kang from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and Kathy Dallest from the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF).
The Queensland node is one of the 9 nodes across Australia that feed data into Health Data Australia, the national health research data catalogue that makes sharing and requesting access to data from health studies easier.
This Queensland node was collaboratively designed by Health Translation Queensland in collaboration with CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre, QCIF, ARDC and other Queensland partners. The Queensland node received investment from the ARDC, which is funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
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