Data4Life and Monash Health Announce Strategic Collaboration to Advance Clinical Research
Data4Life and Monash Health have partnered to optimize clinical trial design and execution, complemented by educational workshops and professional training programs, with a shared commitment to improving patient outcomes.
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MELBOURNE, Australia, Aug. 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Monash Health, the largest public health service in Victoria, Australia, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Data4Life, an international nonprofit digital health organization funded by the Hasso Plattner Foundation. The announcement was made by Associate Professor Tam C. Nguyen, Director of Research & Innovation, Monash Health and Tim Walz, Chief of Staff, Data4Life, at the Launch of the Monash Health Global Relations Office, with Monash Health Chief Executive Prof. Eugine Yafele and Global Victoria CEO, Danni Jarrett in attendance.
The Global Relations Office is a new site launched at Monash Health to strengthen international health partnerships, building alliances with leading international hospitals, universities, and health organisations for research, training, and knowledge exchange.
Under the MoU, Monash Health will support the alliance's clinical trials through optimized trial timelines and patient enrolment, helping to achieve fast and effective subject recruitment. Data4Life will streamline clinical trial processes, collaborate on patient recruitment activities, and support the secondary use and standardisation of health data through open science and common data models, alongside professional training in Good Clinical Practice (GCP), study conduct, and other areas of clinical research.
Monash Health provides care for 1.2 million residents through 250 integrated services delivered across more than 40 locations and communities in southeast Melbourne, including statewide tertiary support for complex women's, neonatal, and paediatric care. Its research portfolio comprises 1,600 active studies, including 600 FIH and phase 2 trials and observational studies. Monash Health also operates two paediatric and two adult clinical trial centres, supported by two ethics committees/IRBs covering both paediatric and adult studies.
''Monash Health is an institution that brings exceptional clinical depth. With over 175 years of experience and decades of longitudinal records, it is a world-leading partner for such a collaboration. Data4Life is committed to providing Monash Health's teams with the tools and expertise required to perform federated studies, cross-border comparisons, and reproducible real-world evidence as efficiently as possible.''- Dr. Ben M.W. Illigens, CEO, Data4Life
The collaboration brings together Monash Health's clinical research expertise with Data4Life's scientific and technical expertise and open-source software platforms, D4L Collect and Data2Evidence, built on HL7® FHIR® and the OMOP Common Data Model, respectively.
D4L Collect is a platform for collecting prospective, multimodal health data in clinical and epidemiological studies through a secure researcher workspace and participant mobile app. It supports patient-reported outcomes (PROs), questionnaires, wearable and sensor data, and other health data in HL7® FHIR® format. D4L Collect workflows are designed to support decentralized data collection, conforming with GCP and ICH E6(R3) requirements.
Data2Evidence is an integrated Real-World Data (RWD) platform, designed for standardization and analysis of healthcare data, and reproducible Real-World Evidence (RWE) generation. It combines ETL mapping, quality assessment, cohort definition, OHDSI analytics, secure governance, and supporting federated studies in one platform, reducing manual processes and time to evidence.
Beyond clinical trials, both organizations will expand their collaboration through knowledge exchange, workshops, training programmes, and other joint initiatives. Tim Walz has been invited to Monash Health's Research and Innovation Week 2026 (7–11 September), where he will discuss the collaboration's progress to date and the strategy ahead.
About Data4Life
Data4Life develops open-source clinical research software built on internationally recognized standards, including FHIR and OMOP CDM. Funded by the Hasso Plattner Foundation, we operate under nonprofit governance, serving researchers, healthcare organizations, life sciences companies, and regulators with the digital tools required for fit-for-purpose real-world data and real-world evidence generation.
Designed to support multicenter studies and decentralized data collection, our integrated software ecosystem streamlines the secondary use of health data, from prospective multimodal data collection and standardization to reproducible data quality assessment and data analysis.
Our federated approach enables collaboration across distributed data sources while preserving patient privacy and data sovereignty as well as supporting security, governance, and regulatory requirements across jurisdictions.
We're headquartered in Potsdam, with offices in Berlin and Singapore, and partner with leading academic and healthcare institutions including Mount Sinai, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, and the Hasso Plattner Institute.
As co-lead of OHDSI Germany, Data4Life contributes open-source software and technical expertise, supports OMOP CDM adoption, and participates in network studies and collaborative research across borders.
Data4Life will co-host the OHDSI Europe Symposium 2028 in Germany with our OHDSI Germany partners, bringing together researchers, healthcare organizations, regulators, and industry from across the globe for three days of scientific exchange in observational health research.
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SOURCE D4L data4life gGmbH
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