Overview
The Carolina Data Warehouse for Health (CDW-H) houses clinical health records for all UNC Hospitals patients. These records are a valuable source of data for researchers. In addition to enabling access for legitimate healthcare and research purposes, the CDW-H must protect against loss of these records to ensure patient privacy and security.
RENCI, in collaboration with UNC TraCS, the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and UNC Hospitals, is developing the Secure Medical Workspace (SMW) system to enable the CDW-H to provide researchers and healthcare professionals secure access to patient records. SMW will combine a secure centralized infrastructure with virtualization and data leakage protection technologies to allow researchers to manipulate and analyze their research data while ensuring that sensitive patient information remains within the SMW environment.
Authorized researchers will connect to SMW from their local computing devices over a secure network connection to a dedicated virtual workspace containing data provisioned for the research project. The system will provide researchers access to standard analytical software packages for working with the data as well as storage space for saving output files securely.
The pilot deployment will assess the capacity for the virtual workspace environment to provide the data analysis tools needed by researchers. The pilot also will determine protocols for sharing secure files among researchers working on a project team and develop methods to allow secure exporting of information for publication and other purposes.
Overview
The Carolina Data Warehouse for Health (CDW-H) houses clinical health records for all UNC Hospitals patients. These records are a valuable source of data for researchers. In addition to enabling access for legitimate healthcare and research purposes, the CDW-H must protect against loss of these records to ensure patient privacy and security.
RENCI, in collaboration with UNC TraCS, the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and UNC Hospitals, is developing the Secure Medical Workspace (SMW) system to enable the CDW-H to provide researchers and healthcare professionals secure access to patient records. SMW will combine a secure centralized infrastructure with virtualization and data leakage protection technologies to allow researchers to manipulate and analyze their research data while ensuring that sensitive patient information remains within the SMW environment.
Authorized researchers will connect to SMW from their local computing devices over a secure network connection to a dedicated virtual workspace containing data provisioned for the research project. The system will provide researchers access to standard analytical software packages for working with the data as well as storage space for saving output files securely.
The pilot deployment will assess the capacity for the virtual workspace environment to provide the data analysis tools needed by researchers. The pilot also will determine protocols for sharing secure files among researchers working on a project team and develop methods to allow secure exporting of information for publication and other purposes.
Funding
Clinical and Translational Science Awards, National Institutes of Health
Project Leaders
Javed Mostafa, UNC Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science
Michael Shoffner, RENCI
RENCI Project Team
Phil Owen
Erik Scott
Charles Schmitt
Xiaoshu Wang
Casey Averill
Collaborators
NC TraCS Institute
UNC School of Information and Library Science
UNC Hospitals
