WA Cross Jurisdictional Project

Some significant health data relating to Western Australia is held by the Australian government. This includes information about residential care and related data concerning aged people, as well as Medicare data which includes pharmaceutical claims in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and claims for visits to general practitioners and some other treatments in the Medical Benefits Scheme (MBS).

The desirability of linking these data into the Linkage System has been recognised since the inception of the WA Data Linkage Project. However, legislative and privacy concerns as well as administrative difficulties in initiating collaborations between states and the Australian Government proved to be daunting obstacles. Nonetheless, a pilot project to link together the hospital, death, PBS and MBS for a group of diabetic patients from WA was eventually approved after some four years of effort. During the process a "best practice protocol" was developed which takes into account privacy concerns as well as enabling data custodians to retain control over the use being made of the information in their care. This protocol is now being widely used in a number of linkage projects across the country.

Subsequent to the successful implementation of the pilot project a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was drawn up and signed by the WA Department of Health and the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing. This MoU covered the cooperation of the two jurisdictions in linking together appropriate data sets to enable research and policy analysis for the public good. Two separate schedules to the MoU - and more may be added in the future - cover (1) the linkage of residential aged care data and (2) the linkage of MBS and PBS claims data.

Linkage of the aged care information to December 2003 was completed in 2004 and an update is about to commence. The larger task of linking Medicare claims data (1990 to 2003) to the entire population of WA was completed in October 2005.  An update to include new Medicare enrollments to December 2005 is underway.

The application for Cross-Jurisdictional Linked Administrative Data can be seen here (word format, 909kB).

To indicate what information is required from the WA health data collections, applicants must complete the relevant data schedules and forward them with the application for Cross-Jurisdictional Linked Administrative Data. Click here to link to the schedules (Step 4 of the application process).

Applications must be approved by the Department of Health & Ageing, the Department of Health WA, the Program Manager, Data Linkage and all relevant data custodians. The approval process currently takes a minimum of three months. All applicants are encouraged to contact the Project Officer to discuss the feasibility of their project before completing the application and also to discuss the current waiting time for approval and data release.

Although 22 Cross Jurisdictional project applications have been received since 1 July 2005, to date only 14 have been approved by all WA and XJSC custodians and 11 have received their complete data extracts.