Regenstrief Secures Contract to Protect COVID Research Data
(photo courtesy of the Regenstrief Institute)
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute will continue its partnership with the National Institutes of Health as part of a national consortium collecting medical data on COVID-19. Regenstrief says the new two-year contract is initially worth more than $2.3 million over the first year, but the funding could reach $15 million.
Regenstrief serves as the Linkage Honest Broker for the National COVID-19 Cohort Collaborative. The N3C is a national effort to gather medical record data to help scientists understand COVID-19, while still complying with federal HIPAA standards.
The institute says it, along with the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute and California-based Datavant, has developed a way to securely link data from different research programs without releasing any patient identification information.
“We believe that privacy-preserving record linkage can dramatically improve advanced research uses of clinical data to produce real-world evidence in response to health and healthcare needs,” said N3C Linkage Honest Broker Director Dr. Umberto Tachinardi, who is chief information officer for Regenstrief Institute. “We continue to build upon this technology and infrastructure to constantly evaluate and help produce fair and non-biased data to support equitable research.”
Regenstrief says these datasets containing medical records from across the country are used by researchers to answer questions related to COVID-19, its impact and its treatment and prevention.