Talk:Student Projects:Database Protection

(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.