Seminar 06P - Aligning Your Research Computing with HIPAA (separate registration required)

The rapid rise of academic research involving high throughput gene sequencing, patient health records analysis, and clinical trial data storage, analysis, and management has firmly placed biomedical researchers in the traditional research and high-performance computing domain previously dominated by physical scientists and engineers. Not only does biomedical research require supercomputers and massive data storage, it brings another unknown—regulatory compliance—to the research computing culture. Biomedical data often contains personally identifiable, electronic protected health information (ePHI), which is regulated by the HIPAA. Since the HIPAA Security Rule has strict, formal information security requirements, this poses a great challenge for a traditional research computing shop. We'll describe the steps Indiana University initiated in 2009 to align its entire research computing cyberinfrastructure with HIPAA and provide guidance and material to jump-start the process at other institutions.