UNMC and Nebraska Medicine have adopted an “honest broker” program to establish standardized procedures for researchers to use de-identified protected health information in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Institutional Review Board.
“Electronic health records such as OneChart contain tremendous amounts of information,” said Chris Kratochvil, M.D., associate vice chancellor for clinical research at UNMC and vice president of research for Nebraska Medicine.
“This data can be used by researchers for a number of things, ranging from understanding outcomes of various treatments to identifying patterns of illness in specific populations. The ‘honest brokers’ help to make sure that the data is accessed in a regulatory compliant way.”
An honest broker is a neutral member of the workforce who is certified to collect specific health information from the tissue or data bank.
They then remove all patient identifiers so the patient cannot be identified directly or indirectly, and only then give the de-identified information to research investigators, clinicians or other health care workforce members.
The honest broker can also facilitate identifying potential research subjects by contacting patients’ personal physicians, who would in turn contact the patients.
For additional information, please refer to the policies below:
Nebraska Medicine Honest Broker Policy
For any questions, contact Tara Scrogin, privacy officer, or Sharon Welna, information security officer.