Most healthcare encounters in Australia happen in general practice and other primary care settings. Yet this data has historically been excluded from comprehensive, nationally consistent collections, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's flagship Australia's Health 2026 report.
The finding appears in a dedicated focus area of the report, titled "From silos to systems: strengthening Australia's health data," published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) on 9 July 2026. It is the 20th edition of the AIHW's biennial flagship publication, produced by the agency's Flagship Reporting Unit with input from an external expert editorial board.
Efforts to close the primary care gap are underway through the National Primary Health Care Data Collection, which aims to harmonise data recorded in clinical systems, including patient characteristics, reasons for encounter and diagnoses, so it can be analysed securely and routinely for national and local reporting.
The AIHW said early pilots have shown this is feasible but have also exposed the complexity of the primary care data environment, which it said would benefit from coordinated national support. A dementia diagnosis project run with 17 Primary Health Networks was cited as an early demonstration of what aggregate general practice data can reveal once collected consistently.
Fragmentation still obscures system performance
Beyond primary care, the report identifies persistent fragmentation across the wider health data landscape. Hospital data collected by states and territories reflects local administrative practices and system requirements, resulting in differences in definitions, formats and collection processes that complicate national comparison. The report states plainly that these interfaces, particularly between primary care, hospital care, disability, aged care and other community services, are where "fragmented data have obscured system performance."
A related AIHW topic summary, Improving Australia's health data, spells out the practical cost of this fragmentation.
"Greater national consistency is essential for a health information system that can be reliably combined and compared across jurisdictions," the AIHW states.
"At present, variations in definitions, coding practices and data formats mean that information collected in one part of the country often cannot be easily aligned with another. These inconsistencies limit the usefulness of linked data and slow progress on understanding how the health system performs as a whole."
The AIHW sums up the overall state of play bluntly: "Australia's health data landscape is rich but constrained by fragmentation, inconsistent standards and uneven access – conditions that limit visibility across care pathways and slow meaningful improvement."
The report is careful to note that closing these gaps does not require complete uniformity in how data is collected across settings, nor the elimination of local variation in practice. Instead, the priority is agreed metadata standards, concordances and linkage methods that allow data to be interpreted and analysed together, even where the underlying collections remain different.
Recent initiatives aimed at addressing this include CSIRO's Sparked program and the Australian Clinical Data for Interoperability (AUCDI) project, both focused on agreeing core concepts, data elements and interoperability arrangements across jurisdictions and sectors.
The report says clear metadata, transparent documentation and well-described data sources are what ultimately allow users to understand how data was captured and how comparisons should be interpreted, reducing duplication and improving data quality and usability.
Linkage systems still maturing
The report also points to the National Linked Data System, which combines the AIHW's National Health Data Hub, the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Person Level Integrated Data Asset, Population Health Research Network linkage nodes, and state and territory linkage nodes.
While demand for access to these linked assets has grown, the report frames the current national health data system as still being built from a set of separately maturing initiatives, rather than a single coherent architecture, with continued investment in data capability, quality, sharing and governance described as essential to sustaining the shift from measuring activity to understanding impact.
The full report is available via the AIHW website.