Background
In 2022, Queensland Health engaged Triple Innovation to identify the economic and health benefits expected to be derive from an innovative Population Health Database it has been developing – known as Project ATHENA – to reduce the cost of finding and recruiting patients for clinical trials in Queensland. The health database brings together primary and secondary care health data under patient consent together with lifestyle and genomic data, similar to the strategy and success achieved by the UK Biobank. Currently commercially sponsored trials in Australia and overseas suffer from the difficulty of predicting where they can find suitable patients and and how they can find enough patients and then retain them in the trial to meet regulatory protocols. Finding and retaining patients costs money and more importantly time.
Project objectives
This project included the following components:
1. A detailed literature scan to identify the challenges commercial and non-commercial Sponsors of clinical trials experience today when recruiting patients and how they have sought to address these challenges.
2. Defining and quantifying the value proposition access to a state-wide population health database would offer to Sponsors to accelerate patient recruitment
3. Calculating the increase in clinical trial activity that might be expected in Queensland if the efficiency benefits of a population health database could be delivered to Sponsors
4. Calculating the economic benefits of an additional clinical trial in terms of inbound trial investment and the consequent employment growth
5. Identifying the likely health benefits to the Queensland community enabled by increasing clinical trial activity – over time a higher level of activity engages more Queenslanders seeking new therapies and should enable faster translation of successful therapies into clinical practice to improve the health of Queenslanders with commensurate downstream productivity benefits
6. The net economic benefits of funding a population scale health database.
Outcome
Above all, this project proved that investing in the infrastructure to develop a population-wide health database has the potential to deliver significant short-term benefits to Queensland in the form of additional clinical trials and downstream economic benefits. Equally and perhaps more importantly, investment in this infrastructure could underpin major investment in preventative health which would itself unlock long-term economic and health benefits for Queensland. Preventative health and precision medicine enabled by investment in digital health infrastructure is without question the future of health investment. However, it will take a significant culture change in health administration to shift investment towards this objective.