ARDC and Data4Life Enter Partnership to Strengthen Global Health Data Infrastructure
Canberra, Australia, June 30, 2026 - The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has signed a memorandum of understanding with Data4Life, an international nonprofit digital health organisation supported by the Hasso Plattner Foundation. The agreement sets up a framework for the 2 organisations to collaborate on digital infrastructure, with a focus on health data collection, curation and analysis for health research. Both organisations are committed to improving global health outcomes and equity through the improved use of data.
Through the People Research Data Commons and the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons, the ARDC is delivering digital infrastructure for health and social science research data, respectively. The partnership pairs this infrastructure with Data4Life’s health data platforms, aiming to make datasets more accessible to researchers while maintaining strict privacy and security standards.
A central focus of the partnership is standardising health data to common international models, such as the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model, so researchers can compare and combine datasets across borders without moving the underlying sensitive data. In Australia, this work is already underway through the Australian Health Data Evidence Network (AHDEN), an ARDC partnership initiative making hospital medical records research-ready using the OMOP model.
Tim Walz, Chief of Staff at Data4Life, noted that open-science standards remove technical barriers, allowing clinical and hospital data to be harmonised and reused safely across institutions. “The real bottleneck in health research was never data volume – it’s incompatible infrastructure,” Mr Walz said. “When hospitals and health systems can collaborate on shared, open standards rather than building in isolation, they enable larger-scale, more representative, and more reproducible research.”
In Australia, the ARDC operates Health Data Australia, a national catalogue for discovering, requesting access to and sharing clinical trials and, soon, cohort study data. Data4Life runs similar platforms – D4L Collect and Data2Evidence – for data collection, curation and analysis. The partnership will enhance these tools and also build capability across the sector by helping data custodians improve their data, supporting researchers in generating robust evidence, and helping the sector work toward positive change in health outcomes.
The partnership also connects Australian health data infrastructure to international networks, such as the European Health Data and Evidence Network (EHDEN) Foundation, as well as the Observational Health Data Science and Informatics (OHDSI) Europe and Asia Pacific chapters, in which Data4Life is an active contributor. Dr Adrian Burton, Deputy CEO of ARDC and Director of the People Research Data Commons, noted that health challenges don’t stop at national borders and infrastructure needs to reflect that.
“The ARDC and Data4Life are both mission-led data-driven organisations looking to empower researchers to improve care and prevention for better health and wellbeing in society,” remarked Dr Burton. “Hospitals and universities are overflowing with health and medical data, but bringing it together into a coherent analytics and research capability remains elusive. Our partnership focuses on data harmonisation and analytical tooling to unlock that potential.”
The ARDC and Data4Life will continue to explore specific project opportunities under the new partnership agreement, particularly around data harmonisation and secure analysis environments.
Health and medical researchers interested in data sharing and international standards can:
learn more about Data4Life
explore Health Data Australia
learn more about AHDEN
find out more about and register interest in the People Research Data Commons.
The ARDC is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
About Data4Life
Data4Life develops open science solutions for real-world health data, serving academia, pharmaceutical research, and global health authorities. Through our solutions D4L Collect and Data2Evidence, we support the full workflow from real-world data capture and standardization to evidence generation, built on standards including OMOP and FHIR.
Data4Life co-leads the OHDSI Germany national node and collaborates with research institutions worldwide to advance standards-based, reproducible real-world evidence generation. In collaboration with world-leading partners, we enable cross-border studies and turn distributed health data into analysis-ready insights, without compromising data privacy or institutional sovereignty.
Data4Life is a nonprofit digital health organization supported by the Hasso Plattner Foundation. Founded in 2017, our work is guided by a long-term commitment to impact, ethical data use, and open science collaboration. Data4Life is headquartered in Potsdam, Germany, with additional offices in Berlin, Germany, and Singapore.
Press contact:
Daniela Wilberg
Head of Marketing & Communications
Email: media@data4life.care
Mobile: +49 162 272 9163
Research institutions that would like to conduct digital studies with D4LCollect are kindly asked to contact us by email at: b2b@data4life.care or find further information at www.data4life.care
