Improving surveillance infrastructure for Indigenous primary health care

Improving surveillance infrastructure for Indigenous primary health care will enable the expansion of the reach and scope of the ATLAS sentinel surveillance network. 

Our vision is to deliver the largest connected Indigenous primary care surveillance network in Australia, increasing the capacity of Aboriginal Community-Controlled Health Organisations (ACCHOs) and other primary health care services to provide high quality, evidence-based, best practice clinical care: the ATLAS+ project. This will be achieved by extending both the reach and scope of the existing ATLAS surveillance network, a research data infrastructure that successfully provides sexually transmissible infection (STI) and blood-borne virus (BBV) surveillance and monitoring to more than 30 ACCHOs nationally. ATLAS+ will double the number of ACCHOs and other health services participating in the network, resulting in improved linkage of patient-level data between providers and offering surveillance capabilities far beyond notification data or service-level reports.

ATLAS+ will also broaden the scope of the current data infrastructure to implement vaccine-preventable disease (VPD) surveillance and identify priorities and pathways for capture of chronic disease indicators and data within the system. We will also work to adopt into ATLAS the internationally recognised data standards created by Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI), positioning ATLAS+ to readily link to other big data collections nationally and internationally. This integration will be facilitated by the adoption of a Common Data Model (CDM) to standardise ATLAS data concepts with well-defined and internationally accepted medical data semantics.