Building Digital Capability in Health and Medical Research

As Australia transitions towards data-enabled, collaborative models of health and medical research, both technology and workforce capability must advance together. 

Keeping up with the digitisation of health and medical systems 

Australia’s health and medical system is facing growing pressures, as demand for health care continues to rise due to various factors including (but not limited to) an aging population, increasing prevalence of chronic disease and workforce shortages. This has led to increasing pressure to generate timely and high-quality research that can inform clinical practice, treatment and therapies. Nevertheless, this also presents significant opportunities to accelerate discoveries, enable collaborations and reveal new insights from existing health data. 

In the National Digital Health Strategy 2023–2028, the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) recognises that digital technologies and health data are key to enabling evidence-based care. Crucially, it identifies a digitally ready and enabled workforce as one of the core change enablers required to realise the benefits of digital health transformation at a national scale.

The ARDC has developed a Digital Capabilities and Skills Framework, which contributes to these national priorities by providing structured pathways for developing the skills needed to work effectively with digital research infrastructure and health data.  

What is the ARDC Digital Capabilities and Skills Framework?

The ARDC Digital Capabilities and Skills Framework is designed to identify and develop the digital skills needed for modern, data-intensive research and can be applied to any research discipline. It provides a structured approach to building workforce capability so researchers and research support professionals can optimise their use of digital research infrastructure and data.

The framework includes tools such as a skills taxonomy, glossary, role profiles or personas, learning pathways and a skills/roles matrix (Figure 1). Collectively, these help identify current capabilities and determine what skills are required to conduct digital research and how those skills can be developed through targeted training and learning pathways. It defines key competencies across 4 capability areas, including governance, data, software and digital research infrastructure management to address core skills needed to manage, analyse and share research data in increasingly complex digital environments.

Figure 1: Components of ARDC Digital Capabilities and Skills Framework

How to use the ARDC Digital Research Capabilities and Skills Framework

As a guide, we recommend the following steps for using this framework:

1. Define your goals for using the framework, e.g. identifying capability gaps, framing curriculum and creating learning paths.
2. Review the skills taxonomy to understand how the listed skills enable and support digital research and digital research infrastructures.
3. Gather existing workforce data on roles, capabilities, skills and training. 
4. Use the skills/roles profile template to outline role categories and apply the skills/roles matrix to identify required skills and competency levels. 
5. Establish a baseline by comparing existing workforce data with required capabilities to identify skills gaps, then develop a customised skills and training framework.
6. Create role-based learning paths to address the identified gaps.
7. Contribute your materials to the Digital Research Skills Australasia (DReSA) training registry. Materials can include training content, role profiles/personas and learning paths, which can support national alignment and reduce duplicated effort. Integrate with other frameworks where possible.

Applying the Framework for Health and Medical Research 

An example of the framework in action can be found in the Health Studies Australian National Data Asset (HeSANDA) program, an ARDC initiative to build national infrastructure for better access to health research data. To enable the secondary use of clinical trial data via the Health Data Australia platform, developed through HeSANDA, the framework was used to develop role profiles for researchers seeking to access and analyse shared clinical trial datasets. This process revealed key capability gaps, particularly in navigating the governance requirements associated with clinical trial data access and in analysing complex secondary datasets.

ARDC partnered with the NextGen Evidence Synthesis Team, NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre, and CT:IQ to develop targeted resources to support researchers working with shared clinical trial data, such as the Secondary Use of Clinical Trials Data in Health Research: A Practical Guide and resources created through the Clinical Research Data Sharing Frameworks project. 

Similar principles are being applied within the Australian Health Data Evidence Network (AHDEN). Guided by the Framework, the project is assessing the national skills landscape and developing personas that reflect the roles working with harmonised health data. These personas will inform a ‘community of practitioners’, where clinical, technical and governance stakeholders collaborate to validate, refine and apply the skills needed to work with the standardised language of EMR data and generate evidence using the OMOP Common Data Model.

These initiatives demonstrate how the Framework can be used to identify workforce capability gaps and guide the development of targeted resources that enable researchers to optimally use digital infrastructure. 

Read and download the ARDC Digital Capabilities and Skills Framework.

This article was originally published in Research Australia’s INSPIRE magazine, Issue 38, on 30 April 2026.

The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.