Open AccessThe Secure Medical Research Workspace: An IT Infrastructure to Enable Secure Research on Clinical Data
Author(s) -
Shoffner Michael,
Owen Phillips,
Mostafa Javed,
Lamm Brent,
Wang Xiaoshu,
Schmitt Charles P.,
Ahalt Stanley C.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
clinical and translational science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.303
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1752-8062
pISSN - 1752-8054
DOI - 10.1111/cts.12060
Subject(s) - computer science , informatics , health informatics , data security , workspace , computer security , data science , medicine , encryption , engineering , public health , robot , nursing , artificial intelligence , electrical engineering
Clinical data have tremendous value for translational research, but only if security and privacy concerns can be addressed satisfactorily. A collaboration of clinical and informatics teams, including RENCI, NC TraCS, UNC's School of Information and Library Science, Information Technology Service's Research Computing and other partners at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a system called the Secure Medical Research Workspace (SMRW) that enables researchers to use clinical data securely for research. SMRW significantly minimizes the risk presented when using identified clinical data, thereby protecting patients, researchers, and institutions associated with the data. The SMRW is built on a novel combination of virtualization and data leakage protection and can be combined with other protection methodologies and scaled to production levels.