Akaza presents secure phenotypic data mgt. for complex genetic disorders at Oracle World & MGH.

Featured Presentations at MGH’s Center for Human Genetics Research and at Oracle World

(September 2003) Dr. Nitin Sawhney, Tom Hickerson, and Cal Collins of Akaza Research recently gave talks to clinical researchers and the informatics community on database security and regulatory compliance for basic life science research. The talks focused on management and analysis of clinical research data, particularly within the context of the much discussed Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

The Akaza team members spoke at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Human Genetics (CHGR) to an audience of researchers, clinicians, and technicians on the challenges of clinical and genetics research. The talk, given as part of the CHGR’s annual Research Retreat, discussed the challenges of clinical and genetic research for complex diseases, and highlighted Akaza’s experience in designing and implementing systems for multi-site, collaborative studies. Topics such as creation of user-defined phenotypic parameters, submission and validation of data, managing multiple sites and projects in a centralized repository, and issues related to HIPAA and security for clinical research settings were also discussed. Cal Collins, Chief Technology Officer at Akaza, noted that “as genomic data becomes more complete and accessible, there is a need to deal with distributed, complex clinical information in order to take advantage of that genomic data. We aim to contribute to the solution by providing a secure, environment that is easily customized and promotes accessibility, auditing, and collaboration.”

Dr. Sawhney, Chief Scientific Officer at Akaza Research, and Mr. Collins presented as part of the Life Sciences track at Oracle World 2003 in San Francisco. They discussed HIPAA and its impacts on basic science research, outlined key concerns and solutions for organizations looking for a better understanding of how to comply with HIPAA. This talk outlined the use of Oracle Label Security, Selective Data Encryption, and Oracle Auditing as technologies that can aid in meeting HIPAA’s Privacy Rules and Security Standards. Dr. Sawhney has performed extensive investigation into HIPAA and its implications for basic scientific research. He notes that “despite the seeming complexity of HIPAA guidelines, the key privacy and security provisions can be implemented by designing clinical applications using security features in Oracle, particularly to ensure strong authentication, integrity, confidentiality and auditing.” We have already begun to integrate many such security provisions in the Pheno system at Mass General Hospital, and continue to apply this expertise on client projects dealing with clinical data.

Akaza Research will release its findings in a whitepaper on Database Security and HIPAA, in the near future.

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