Automated geocoding of routinely collected health data in New South Wales

Abstract

Almost every record of an individual’s contact with the NSW health system contains some form of spatial information, whether a street address or postcode. This information can be used to assign a geocode to the record, which in turn can be used to examine the spatial distributions of disease and health service utilisation. This article describes a study that compares two different methods of geocoding addresses from routinely collected administrative health data to enable small area analysis.