In 2005, an application led by the University of Western Australia for funding and designation as a state Centre of Excellence was successful. The grant of ~ $2 million was awarded to the consortium of four partners already working together to build, manage and utilize the data linkageThe process of establishing whether two or more pieces of information belong to or describe the same person, family, event, place or time period. infrastructure.
The DLA vision:
- Draw on one of the few truly unique competitive advantages possessed by WA in its ability to attract external science investment, due to its possession of comprehensive, population-based health databases, and recent local achievements in community leadership and medical informatics that have created individual identity-relationships between millions of database records;
- Place beyond any doubt the position of WA as the pre-eminent national provider of cutting-edge data linkage expertise, technology, service delivery and training to the health and human services sectors;
- Bring together a multidisciplinary group of science and technology leaders with outstanding track records, who will facilitate dynamic collaborations across the globe;
- Create a data linkage facility in WA, unparalleled anywhere in the world and capable of attracting large-scale international funding support, especially with respect to pharmaco-epidemiology and population health genomics research;
- Is an infrastructure that goes to the heart of social and economic imperatives for all modern societies: how to create the best conditions possible for citizens to achieve a high quality of life and health; and
- Is strategically crafted by the collaborative partners to be highly achievable with Centre of Excellence funding (it represents just over a doubling in the scale and scope of the existing WADLSThe Western Australian Data Linkage System creates and stores links within and between the stateÕs health data collections. The WADLS does not contain any clinical or service data, rather it consists of groups of links called chains.).
In 2011, we are actively seeking funds to support further developments.