COVID-19 Register updated to include more than 7 million records
The COVID-19 Register combines COVID-19 case data with a range of health administrative data sets to further explore the impact on population groups and monitor related health outcomes, such as hospitalisations and deaths.
Version 2.5 of the Register was released in February 2024, with more than 7 million records linked to a range of administrative data sets. Updating the content provides a growing longitudinal resource for COVID-19 cases and allows research into patients’ health journey over time.
The platform provides a foundation for a wide range of research purposes, allowing easy access to COVID data from across Australia (7 out of 8 jurisdictions).
The COVID-19 Register provides many benefits.
The Register contributes a wealth of knowledge to the research community by filling existing research gaps with its ‘person-centred’ model of bringing data together - allowing for each person in Australia to have a unique record in the data and distinguishing whether that person has had multiple infections over time. The Register is designed to be interoperable with existing and new national data assets, such as the AIHW National Integrated Health Services Information (NIHSI), the Australian Bureau of Statistics Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA), and the National Disability Data Asset (NDDA - which is currently under development).
The data are currently being used to identify risk factors for severity, long term effects and re-infection to inform service planning and improve immediate, medium, and longer-term health outcomes for the Australian population. The Register enables a better understanding of the service and treatment needs of people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and particularly those who develop long term effects of COVID-19 or have had a COVID-19 vaccine, as well as interactions with pre-existing comorbidities.
What’s next for the Register?
The next steps of this project are to improve the coverage of COVID-19 cases, which includes linking case data up to December 2022 for all jurisdictions.
During 2024, the data in the COVID-19 Register will be integrated with the National Integrated Health Services Information (NIHSI), which is being re-branded as the National Health Data Hub (NHDH). The NHDH aims to support and streamline broader data integration, bringing together Commonwealth and State and Territory health data holdings. This integration will enable the on-going use of the COVID-19 case data beyond the end of the current funding period (December 2024).