About us

"The Healthy Ageing Data Platform represents a major achievement – we've established a powerful, comprehensive data system that now drives research to enhance population health and deliver solutions to some of the nation’s most critical ageing issues."

Professor Nadine Andrew, Research Lead

Our history

The National Centre for Healthy Ageing (NCHA) is a partnership between Monash University and Peninsula Health forming a centralised hub for innovation and transformation of care practices. The overarching objective of the NCHA is to address the increasingly complex challenges being faced by healthcare systems as a consequence of ageing populations. The NCHA research activities are underpinned by the Healthy Ageing Data Platform, which established a high-quality regularly updated core of research relevant Electronic Health Record data. Since commencement in 2020, the NCHA team has developed data integration infrastructure and governance processes for the secure release of data for research putting them at the forefront of the use of such data for ageing research.

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What makes us unique?

EHR data are primarily collected for operational and clinical documentation purposes NOT research. The Healthy Ageing Data Platform is unique in that it is designed specifically to support high quality research using EHR data. Within the Platform we have internally linked EHR data from multiple systems across an entire health service and curated the data to a standard required for research. In doing so we have created a naturalistic cohort of >1 million people over 10 years within a defined geographic population with a comprehensive view of their health care journey.

Building on global collaborations the platform contains high-quality data supporting healthcare and clinical research relevant to healthy ageing. It employs cutting-edge and future-proof analytical techniques such as data linkage, deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and natural language processing for effective and efficient interpretation of different kinds of data. It is supported by established ethics committees and governance frameworks co-designed with community members, to ensure that data safety practices and protocols are rigorous and well trusted by the public.

Ultimately, what sets the Healthy Ageing Data Platform apart from other models is that it:

  • provides an easy-to-use integrated data environment to help consumers, researchers and health providers identify gaps in knowledge for important priorities across the full life course;
  • supports the conduct of the highest quality research to generate insights into solutions;
  • enables the implementation and efficient testing of innovative models of care; and
  • supports learning systems that allow scaling of these solutions nationally and internationally.

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Meet the team

  • Data Operations Manager – Dr Sumit Parikh
  • Research Manager – Dr Emily Mann
  • Senior Research Fellow – Dr Alison Carver
  • Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) Manager – Lucy Marsh
  • Data Linkage Specialist – Dr David Ung
  • Lead Biostatistician – Dr Taya Collyer
  • Data Warehouse Officer – Rashwinder Dhillon

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Data Platform team
BACK row (L–R): Rashwinder Dhillon, Dr Taya Collyer, Professor Nadine Andrew, A/Professor Richard Beare, Lucy Marsh, Dr Kim Naude, Dr Sumit Parikh
FRONT row (L–R): Dr David Ung, Professor Velandai Srikanth, Dr Emily Mann, Afton Nido

Connect with us!

Connect with us today to discover how the Healthy Ageing Data Platform can support your research objectives!

Email: nchadataaccess@monash.edu