Researcher access and eligibility

The National Integrated Health Services Information (NIHSI) has transitioned to the National Health Data Hub (NHDH).

Researchers who wish to access the data in the NHDH will need to ensure their research project falls under the approved uses for the NHDH.

Researchers will also need to complete a project proposal form, which will be reviewed and approved by the NHDH data custodian and an AIHW Ethics Committee delegate before being provided to the NHDH Advisory Committee for consideration and approval. 

Before you complete your project proposal form, please confirm that: 

  1. Your project purpose is in line with the AIHW Ethics Committee approved themes of research (epidemiological and statistical research, service use and medication dispensing and patient journeys, identifying groups or cohorts of interest or monitoring, evaluation, and data quality improvement)
  2. someone in your team has proficiency or the ability to gain proficiency in at least one of the statistical analytical languages available in the secure access environment (e.g. R, Python, Stata, SAS) 
  3. your proposed research is in the public interest and benefit 
  4. your research is not for commercial gain 
  5. your project will not name people or name service providers 
  6. you have the support of the organisation you work for 
  7. your team members are all located in Australia. 

If you cannot confirm all of these points, your project is likely not suitable at present. 

Please contact AIHW at [email protected] if you would like to discuss the specifics of your project. 

Once a project is approved, a new researcher induction training session will be organised with the project leader. 

The NHDH may also be accessed to undertake a related program of analysis work. Researchers are welcome to submit a project proposal that describes a program of analysis work, rather than individual project proposals for each specific project. The researcher will need to describe the program of analysis and demonstrate how the program of analysis is related. Please contact AIHW at [email protected] if you would like to discuss the specifics of your analysis work.

Costs

Approved researchers can access the data available in NHDH for approved projects. Researchers will access the NHDH data via an AIHW managed instance of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Secure Environment for Analysing Data (SEAD).

NHDH SEAD access fee schedule – 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025 (all fees are exclusive of GST)

One-off project fees (cost per project) – standard and complex projects
ItemsSEAD

Project establishment

  • IT project set-up
  • Project approvals
  • Onboarding training

$3,000 AUD

Annual project fees (cost per project) – standard and complex projects
ItemsSEAD

Project curation

  • Ingress, egress, and external release approvals

  • Ongoing management

$3,000 AUD

Databricks (if required)

From $2,500 AUD ^

Annual user fees (cost per researcher/analyst) – standard and complex projects
ItemsSEAD

Virtual machine

  • Set-up costs

  • Standard issue with CPU cores 8 and 64GB RAM

  • Access to LibreOffice

  • Access to Stata

$4,180 AUD^

Access to SAS

$1,250 AUD^

Access to LibreOffice

NA – included in VM costs

Access to Stata (optional)

NA – included in VM costs

Data linkage and extraction costs (cost per project) – complex projects only
ItemsSEAD

Linkage feasibility review

From $2,000 AUD

Bespoke linkage (per dataset cost)

From $19,500 AUD

Project scoping and subject matter expertise

From $2,000 AUD

NA – not applicable

^ Direct costs AIHW are charged by ABS for SEAD environment

Please contact the NHDH team via [email protected] to discuss your project and the charges that apply.