title: The secure medical research workspace: an IT infrastructure to enable secure research on clinical data.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Renaissance Computing Institute and School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. shoffner@renci.org
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shoffner
authors.forename: Phillips
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Owen
authors.forename: Javed
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mostafa
authors.forename: Brent
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lamm
authors.forename: Xiaoshu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Charles P
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Schmitt
authors.forename: Stanley C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Ahalt
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research; D016494:Computer Security; D003219:Confidentiality; D019992:Databases as Topic; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics