A Monash-led project involving UQ and RCC has gained federal funding to create a national platform to ensure sensitive data remains both secure and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).
The Secure eResearch Platform (SeRP) project is a national collaboration to deliver a secure, trusted and scalable environment for sensitive data sharing, governance, control and management services for researchers.
The project will receive almost $1m in National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) funding via the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), and more than $1.3m from other partners.
Data security for research is an emerging and critical area that needs sustained national investment. Data can be sensitive for many reasons: personal, cultural, national security or commercial sensitivities.
RCC collaborator QCIF is coordinating the adoption of SeRP in Queensland and will work with RCC and UQ researchers to deploy and customise the platform. These UQ researchers are leading national health projects, including the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (ALSWH), the Australian Centre of Excellence in Melanoma Imaging and Diagnosis (ACEMID, which RCC is supporting), and Aged Care Data Compare (ACDC draws on global interRAI data).
For ACEMID, SeRP will enable the establishment of a world-first teledermatology network based on 3D Total Body Photography with the ultimate aim to translate the service — especially big-data with artificial intelligence capabilities — into standard clinical practice.
“SeRP will have a significant impact on our research based on acquiring and transmitting 3D Total Body Images from study participants who will feel confident that their sensitive images will be transmitted and stored in a secure fashion,” said ACEMID Director Professor H. Peter Soyer from UQ’s Dermatology Research Centre.
For ACDC, its equally ambitious goal to develop a data hub, to standardise and support the exchange of aged-care facilities’ resident assessment data, could not be achieved in the intended three-year timeframe without SeRP.
ACDC Senior Biostatistician and Data Scientist Associate Professor Jason Ferris, from UQ’s Centre for Health Services Research, said: “Without this platform, we would be searching for a solution that met our needs, but was also affordable under the project budget — a tough ask without investing a lot of time and resources.
“Now we can concentrate on our research aims around health data exchange and benchmarking quality of care, knowing that our data management will be high-standard and secure for this pilot phase and for future projects in our research plan.”
Beyond UQ’s projects, Dr Dominique Gorse, Director of QCIF Bioinformatics, said SeRP will be extended to accommodate the needs of other Queensland universities.
“SeRP has been a missing component for Queensland’s research infrastructure. We are looking forward to collaborating with Monash and other project partners to build this secure and trusted remote data analysis platform and enabling data governance at scale,” said Dr Gorse.
Monash leads the SeRP project, with key partners including Swansea University (UK), QCIF, the University of NSW, Curtin University, the Sax Institute, LaTrobe University and the University of Melbourne.
The project will enable both institutional and national cross-jurisdictional research projects that bring together national and global sensitive data assets and collaborations.
SeRP has the potential to be scaled nationally to enable Australian institutions to manage their own data while also supporting effective cross-institutional collaborations. This has been demonstrated in the UK, where SeRP underpins some of the largest long-term national scale cross-sector research data partnerships, such as SAIL Databank and Administrative Data Research UK.
Read the Monash University media release about SeRP for more information.
Any queries, please contact Dr Dominique Gorse: d.gorse@qcif.edu.au.
