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The HIPAA Cluster: Ensuring Data

By Sean Igo

Research in health-care related fields, including clinical, biomedical, nursing, and public health research, is an increasingly important and well-funded endeavor, but it has certain complications. Chief among these is the fact that any experiments involving humans and the resulting data are required to conform to stringent legal and ethical standards, as set out in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, known by its acronym "HIPAA."

Such data, called Protected Health Information (PHI), must conform to HIPAA privacy standards. Therefore, it is important that researchers using PHI have access to a secure computing environment in which they may store and manipulate PHI. At the same time, clinical research is increasingly making use of computationally intensive techniques such as data mining, machine learning, statistics, and operations on large data sets. These requirements - large capacity, secure storage and high performance computing - make CHPC the ideal organization to maintain a HIPAA-compliant computational research environment.

Stimulated by NIH grant funding, CHPC now maintains such an environment, named "homer" after University of Utah Professor Emeritus Homer Warner - a pioneer in the field of Biomedical Informatics. Informally, the environment is known as the "HIPAA sandbox." Created through a collaboration of CHPC and the University's Department of Biomedical Informatics, it is isolated from the main CHPC clusters and access to it is highly controlled.

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The Center for High Performance Computing

The University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing provides large-scale computer systems, networking, and the expertise to optimize the use of these high-end technologies. CHPC facilitates advance in academic disciplines whose computational requirements exceed the resources available in individual colleges or departments. Since 1996 these collaborations have resulted in more than 494 technical publications. CHPC's purview is to support faculty and research groups whose main focus requires computing and advanced networking as core instrument(s) central to their research. For detailed information on CHPC activities for 2007-2008 please see our CHPC 2009 Report (PDF).