Challenge: The ATLAS Indigenous Primary Care Surveillance Network is a collaboration with multiple Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (ACCHOs) across Australia to better utilise service level data and drive improvements to the way in which clinics screen, test and treat sexually transmissible infections (STIs) and blood-borne viruses (BBVs) and other vaccine-preventable diseases (VPD). The ATLAS network works with ACCHOs to provide high-quality, evidence-based, best-practice clinical care resulting in improved health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Clinics have secure access to data aggregated at the ACCHO level. However, for research, secure access to network-wide disaggregated data while also adhering to Indigenous data governance and Indigenous data sovereignty principles is required.

Data: ATLAS routinely acquires disaggregated and de-identified electronic medical records to extract STIs, BBV and VPDs data. There are 36 ACCHOs and 5 clinical hubs in the network with ongoing expansion across Australia.

Solution: SeRP and KeyPoint will provide a platform through which our Indigenous data custodians can operationalised the principles of Indigenous data governance and Indigenous data sovereignty for researchers using ATLAS data. Furthermore, the platform can facilitate data linkage with other national STI collections.

Transformation: The secure research environment will 1) expedite researcher access to and linkage with ATLAS network data and 2) improve Indigenous data sovereignty and governance to contribute to the continuous quality improvement of ACCHOs STI, BBV and VPD service delivery for First Nations Peoples.