Vanderbilt medical researchers, engineers play major role in new national center established to secure the privacy of electronic health information
By David Salisbury
May 28, 2010
Slowly but steadily the U.S. health care community is moving into the digital age: shifting their medical records from paper to electronic information systems. This movement raises serious concerns about security and privacy of patients’ medical information. In an attempt to put these concerns to rest, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded $15 million to create a new center for health information and privacy.
The center, which will be headquartered at theUniversity of Illinois, will include researchers from Vanderbilt University; University of California, Berkeley; Carnegie Mellon University; Dartmouth College; Harvard Medical School; Johns Hopkins University; Northwestern Memorial Hospital; Stanford University; University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the University of Washington. It is one of four health care research centers established and funded for four years with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 funds as part of the $60 million Strategic Healthcare Information Technology Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS) program.
“Our participation in the new SHARPS center reflects the fact that Vanderbilt has become highly visible in the field of health care security and privacy,” said Janos Sztipanovits, director of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) at Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering.
State Profiles
Learn about research activity in your state