BioGrid Australia welcomes the announcement of a funding boost that will enable the Appropriate Antimicrobial Use: Scaling Surveillance Using Digital Health project to develop and implement digital monitoring solutions.

Researchers from the University of Melbourne, Royal Melbourne Hospital, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and RMIT University have received a Research Data Infrastructure MRFF grant of $2,962,654.00 to develop and implement digital health solutions for surveillance of the quality of antimicrobial use in healthcare.

The emergence of the global health challenge of antimicrobial resistance has highlighted a need to promote the safe and judicious use of antimicrobial medications, which is one of the pillars of the National Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy in Australia.

This project will build on the National Antimicrobial Prescribing Survey (NAPS), which is already well-embedded in national antimicrobial prescribing quality improvement policy and practice for hospitals and aged care homes.

The funding will enable the project group to develop a research infrastructure to facilitate timely and continuous quality improvement research and clinical feedback, with immediate impact on clinical practice.

BioGrid Australia will facilitate the digital health solution

BioGrid Australia will be supporting the project through a collaboration with other established platforms including Patron (University of Melbourne) and VetCompass (University of Sydney and veterinary schools nationally).

“We’re thrilled to be supporting this program, which will have a significant impact on clinical practice  is delivering important information to researchers about the use of antimicrobial medications in Australia across the healthcare system,” says Maureen Turner, Chief Executive Officer of BioGrid Australia.

“The work this funding will support will be internationally unique. The translational potential of developing this infrastructure to simultaneously meet the needs of primary care as well as veterinary medicine is significant.”

BioGrid Australia will work with each antimicrobial prescribing service team (hospital, surgical, aged care, general practice and veterinary) to receive curated data that has undergone natural language processing and machine learning.

This data will be pulled into the BioGrid data integration platform to enable dynamic reporting through a business intelligence portal for NAPS as well as facilitate linkage to other datasets. Data federation, aggregation, and linkage would be facilitated by BioGrid. It is intended that researchers from all health sectors will have secure access to data.

About BioGrid

BioGrid is an Australian not for profit operation, established to help medical researchers leverage their work and the work of their peers for better overall medical research outcomes.

BioGrid’s unique offering is access to data, and everything that is required to ensure that access remains secure and the data is protected.

BioGrid is the only collaboration network in Australia with the legal and ethical framework to enable the sharing of real-time hospital and clinic-based health and medical data for research. All data are protected and ethically controlled to ensure both patient privacy and secure access.