The Linked Data for Better Health group, led by Associate Professor Rosemary Korda, hosted a half day Policy and Practice Forum on the topic of using Multi-Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP) data to answer policy relevant questions on health in Australia.

The forum was incredibly well received. Many attendees commented that it was exciting to attend an in-person event with fantastic presentations and high quality research, and that the forum was an outstanding example of the benefits of ongoing research-policy partnerships.

This sell out event was attended by 130 people, including representatives from ACT Government and Commonwealth government departments, including Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Department of Health, Department of Defence, Department of Education, Skills and Employment and the National Indigenous Australians Agency.

In the opening address, Dr Paul Jelfs, General Manager of the Social Statistics Division at the ABS, spoke about the importance of ensuring the value of the asset to policy – and ultimately to the public – is recognised and protected. Professor Russell Gruen, Dean of College of Health and Medicine, then drew on his own experiences using health records to speak to the value of linked data.

In the first formal session of the forum, Ms Deepa Wright, Director of Data Services at the ABS provided an overview of the MADIP, including the current state of the asset and where it is headed.

The second session included five speakers presenting case studies of work using MADIP data to understand and improve health care use in Australia. This included talks on improving primary health care, identifying chronic health conditions, understanding impact of structural stigma, sexual orientation and disparities in healthcare use, quantifying the impact of disability insurance reassessment on health care use and modelling service use in the first five years of life.

Session three included four case study examples using MADIP to understand health inequalities. Topics included measuring education-related estimates of inequalities in cause specific mortality, exploring the health of culturally and linguistically diverse populations, developing a household socioeconomic indicator and estimating household disposable income to measure equity in out-of-pocket costs.

The potential development of a MADIP Health Analytics Group was the topic of a whole-of-group discussion in the final session. There was fantastic engagement from attendees on the topic and general agreement that an analytics group would improve utility of the MADIP asset, both in terms of improving the quality if research outputs and improving uptake of findings to improve policy and practice.

The MADIP is a national data asset combining administrative and survey data on health, education, government payments, income and taxation, employment, and population demographics over time, with the potential to revolutionise evidence on health and health care in Australia. The forum was designed to showcase research using MADIP data to improve health and health care in Australia.

The forum was held on Wednesday 10 February at the National Portrait Gallery and was conducted under the ANU’s Linked Data for Better Health program of work, which is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council partnership grant (#1134707) Whole-of-Population Linked Data: Strengthening the Evidence to Drive Improvement in Health and Healthcare in Australia, led by Associate Professor Rosemary Korda.