BioGrid is a not-for-profit organisation that was established by health clinicians to develop a real-time data linkage platform which is federated and proven to work across multiple health organisations, jurisdictions and disease settings where privacy and security of the databases and intellectual property of the data owners is ethically protected. The BioGrid IT platform federates the databases (which are stored, maintained and controlled by the host/member site), creating a virtual repository which can be linked with other databases such as publicly available research and genetic profiling data. The federated BioGrid system enables authorised users to securely access records of thousands of patients (where data is record-linked across multiple databases, organisations and sites), whilst protecting both privacy and intellectual property rights. This is the vision to establish a connection for all life sciences and the Australian Cancer Grid is the flagship. BioGrid is a ‘federation’ of all the researchers’ repositories and can integrate and link to all the participating hospitals and research centres in Australia. By providing access to the data sets, to data on clinical outcomes, administrative data, quality and audit data, biospecimen genomic data, images as well as analytical tools, this platform positions Australia with the capacity to maximise life sciences research. It achieves this by providing secure tools to share and analyse valuable data that was previously isolated and inaccessible. Initiated by clinicians to remove impediments to research progress, BioGrid is a service with the scope and flexibility to respond to the roadblocks of complex research. Data is collected only once and the ability to access different, but related datasets provides a much larger sample size and greater scope for research. As a result, time that was previously spent on data collection is now dedicated to improving research outcomes.