There are many valuable clinical and research datasets hosted within MACH organisations. Some are well known registries, but others are unknown outside their host institution. Discovery and access to these datasets by researchers and clinicians could lead to improved health outcomes for all Australians. MACH aims to foster data-driven healthcare improvement, and supports collaborative activities such as enabling the discovery of existing datasets.
MACH datasets catalogue has over a hundred datasets, held by 10 institutions. It’s designed to make these datasets easy to identify. Each catalogue entry provides a description of the dataset in enough detail to see if it is of interest to you. The entry identifies the owner of the dataset, and indicates how to contact that person for access.
Review the catalogue, find an interesting entry and contact the principle contact for further information about their data.
Some of the datasets can’t be used in research, but the owner may still be keen to collaborate with you.
Any person or project wishing to use any datasets listed in the catalogue will still need to apply for access thorough nationally mandated human ethics and local governance processes.
Periodically we will contact contributors and verify that details for their dataset are up-to-date.
If you would like to contribute your own datasets to the catalogue or update your existing entry please contact Ursula Soulsby
In 2019 a project overseen by Associate Professor Douglas Boyle surveyed researchers and clinicians across the MACH, asking them to identify and describe datasets they controlled that could be of interest to researchers and health services professionals.
The project was sponsored by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and the University of Melbourne’s Petascale Campus Initiative. Over one hundred datasets were identified: some well-known but many previously unpublicised. These form the basis for the dataset catalogue.