Automated geocoding of routinely collected health data in New South Wales.

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.