Clinical Trial Data Partnership Bolsters Data Sharing

Clinical trials require substantial time, money, and effort from everyone involved, including funders, researchers, and participants. To make the most of this investment, enabling clinical trial data to be reused is a way to maximise health innovation and improve medical treatments for all Australians. 

To facilitate the sharing of clinical trial data on a national scale, the ARDC established the Health Studies Australian National Data Asset (HeSANDA) Clinical Trials project in 2021. HeSANDA Clinical Trials is a partnership of 9 nodes, representing 72 research organisations across Australia, covering most of Australia’s states, territories, and health researchers. HeSANDA launched Health Data Australia in 2023, a national catalogue of Australian health data for researchers to discover and request access to data for their research.

We’re pleased to announce that the HeSANDA Clinical Trials partnership has entered a new operational stage of the collaboration through the ARDC’s People Research Data Commons, which is establishing national scale research infrastructure for health and medical research. The new ARDC co-investment in the second phase of the HeSANDA Clinical Trials partnership aims to:

• improve the quality, scalability and sustainability of HeSANDA, including policies, procedures, and systems
• increase the uptake of Health Data Australia by partner organisations and clinical trials
• align and coordinate activity across the HeSANDA network.

Dr Kristan Kang, HeSANDA Program Manager, ARDC, said, “We’re excited to continue our collaboration with the HeSANDA Clinical Trials nodes and partners to promote data sharing and the uptake of Health Data Australia. It’s a vital part of our efforts to ensure health and medical researchers can access national infrastructure that accelerates research and research translation.”

Professor Christopher Reid, leader of the Western Australia Node of HeSANDA, and Chair of the Australian Clinical Trials Alliance (ACTA), said, “Clinical trials of all shapes and sizes contain data that can be utilised beyond the life of the trial for further research.  Hesanda provides the mechanism to enable access to that trial information and to bring researchers together to answer important questions on health outcomes improvement.

“Expanding the uptake of trials engaging with HeSANDA further justifies increasing government investment into the clinical trials sector by extending the life and the opportunity for the trial data to inform on improving health outcomes for Australians.”

The ARDC is partnering to drive the sharing and reuse of health data as part of our goal to make health data, software and models researchers need to improve healthcare more findable, accessible, reusable and interoperable (FAIR). We are also expanding our national infrastructure support for clinical trials and health studies to incorporate trusted research environments and advanced analytics techniques like AI.

Learn more about the HeSANDA Clinical Trials project and visit Health Data Australia.

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