Talk:Student Projects:Database Protection
(moved from the main Database Protection page, which I want to make a more publicly-viewable page)
(DonT) Hi Damon, first thing I need to do is figure out how to "sign" my input as my previous stuff isn't signed and this signiture was placed by ripping off your signature and changing the relevent bits - any guidance would be appreciated as I clearly can't figure it out for myself.
Meeting would be great, I know over the weekend we added a couple folks from the south to our group (WELCOME everyone!!! I'm not sure if any of you are Bears but if so maybe you could let us Huskies know how it feels to have a top 5 ranked football team or maybe just one that can cover the spread:) so we need to figure out how best to include them in the discussion.
If others in the group have specific areas of interest we might organize our paper as a compilation of articles discussing specific instances of database protection. This might allow individuals with specific interests to explore their topic in depth. Or possibly we could each explore our topic with an eye toward (as you suggest) arguments for and against database protection as it relates to that topic.
Just some thoughts...
(DonT)Hi, so I've done a little digging on the HIPAA angle.
Looks very much as if HIPAA is the public policy which arose from the fact that technology was making it increasingly easy to access health care databases in a way that was damaging to the individual. It's easy to imagine scenarios where your health information might be used to "screen" you when - applying for insurance coverage, applying for a new job, applying for a mortgage etc.
Institutional Review Boards, IRBs, continue in their traditional role as gatekeepers for data under their control but now must make certain that researchers protect any patient identifiable data and gather adequate consent from people involved in medical trials. Often researchers are granted access to only "sanitized" data, data which has had all patient identifiers removed. This protection of patient identifiable data often makes collaberation between researchers difficult. For example if two researchers are looking at similar patient populations they may want to collaberate but they need to make certain that their patient populations are separate and distinct, this is difficult with out the presence of patient identifiable data. Another example would be two researchers looking at similar populations but measuring different outcomes - maybe diabetes and osteoporosis for example. The two researchers may decide that valuable insights could be gained if they could study individuals who were tracked in both studies. Without patient indentifiable data this would again be very difficult.
I'm not sure this is heading where I thought it was when I started but it's interesting (to me) anyway.
(DonT)Hi Damon, meeting before class would be great. I'm going to be sort of difficult to get a hold of for the rest of the day. So how bout I just show up at the main HUB cafeteria - by the food court at 5:15. No problem if you can't make it, but if you can we'll see you then.
On a completely different note I talked with a research Doc at the UW regarding my hypothesis that HIPAA or the lack of HIPAA has made conducting medical research much easier in Europe. His feeling is that it isn't the lack of HIPAA but instead socialized medicine (which puts the care and feeding of patient data all under one umbrella) that gives European researchers an edge.
(Damon) I've removed some of the earlier comments on this page that were outdated.
I think Professor Maurer made a good point in his evaluation of our project description -- we may end up heading in pretty different directions with this paper. Let's not stress ourselves out unduly trying to tie them together.
I suggest that we all try to finish up our 5-10 page-per-person sections by the end of the day on Saturday, December 4. We can use the Wiki to cooperatively write up an introduction and conclusion section (I'll start pages for those now). Once we've got all the sections together, we can do some final editing on and after December 5 -- I'll volunteer to take the first pass at cobbling all these things together, & then we can do more editing collaboratively online.
I think we should use this Wiki to communicate with each other, specifically to keep from duplicating work between the different sections. I think the one-page Project Description has done all it can for us, and we should freeze it. To communicate our ideas to each other, I suggest we update our section-specific pages and add notes to this discussion page.
