Health Studies Australian National Data Asset (HeSANDA) program

Overview

The ARDC will take an incremental approach to HeSANDA over a 3 year period. The initial focus is on sharing and reusing clinical trial metadata from publicly funded clinical trials research conducted in the academic sector. To establish this national data asset, the program will have 3 streams:

• Data Development: identifying the data needs, standards, and practices required by researchers involved in data sharing.
• Infrastructure: investing in a coherent nationally distributed infrastructure through the development of a national data asset.
• Culture & Policy: enabling the culture and policies required to make the health data asset beneficial for the research and wider communities.

The ARDC has appointed the MACH Clinical Trials Consortium as one of the nine nodes representing 72 research organisations across Australia.

Priorities for the MACH Node

The MACH Clinical Trials Consortium node aims to implement the objectives of the HeSANDA initiative throughout the consortium’s member institutions and its broader functioning environment by directly contributing to the building of the infrastructure and administrative requirements needed to support the sharing and reuse of clinical trial metadata.

This overarching objective will be achieved by:

• Establishing a network of MACH clinical trials managers to conduct promotional activities advocating for future trials to contribute to the HeSANDA national trials database.
• Ensuring future trials follow standard trial metadata definitions to advance standardisation of trials across all MACH partner institutions.
• Working with MACH HRECS to understand potential types of secondary use of data through the HeSANDA initiative to aid HREC approvals and subsequent future trial submissions to the HeSANDA national trials database.
• Improving environments for metadata storage, transfer, processing across the MACH partners.
• Improving environments to enable greater data discovery and reuse, with appropriate acknowledgement and recognition, across the MACH partners.
• Achieving this improved environment by leveraging existing investments and institutionally sustained commitments:
  • Connect figshare at University of Melbourne to Research Data Agreement for clinical trials following whatever standard for connectivity HeSANDA put in place.
  • Enhance the use and coverage of the wider MACH Research Catalogue for MACH clinical trials.
  • Provide capability to help REDCap clinical trials users generate HeSANDA-compatible metadata.

Collaborators

​The MACH Clinical Trials Consortium is led by Professor Julie Simpson, University of Melbourne.  Technical support is being provided through the University of Melbourne and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

Primary Partners:

University of Melbourne

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI)

Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Centre for Eye Research Australia

Other MACH Partners:

Royal Melbourne Hospital

St Vincent’s Hospital

Austin Hospital

Western Health

Northern Health

BioGrid

This is an open, inclusive collaboration and additional MACH partners will join as the program progresses.

Governance

​A project steering committee has been established to provide oversight, with a management committee, which includes an ADRC representative, meeting more regularly to inform the day to day activity.

The membership of these committees is listed below.

Steering Committee

Management Committee

The MACH node of HeSANDA received investment from the ARDC. The ARDC is funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).