Institute for Healthcare Informatics

We are a secure computing center — compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — that stores, aggregates and innovatively analyzes health care data.

At the IHI, we:

• house an electronic collection of health data
• offer expertise in HIPAA, human subjects research and other regulatory areas
• provide investigators with a service identifying potential cohorts for clinical research and recruitment databases for clinical trials

We support:

• biomedical informatics clients
• data management clients
• the Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI)
  
• research computing clients

The IHI data repository houses almost 700,000 fully identified patient records and limited-data sets of claims encompassing 1.5 million individuals. Our production data capacity is 14.1 terabytes of encrypted storage, with clustered servers that have the ability to scale as data and transaction needs grow. We host tools for cohort identification and feasibility studies such as an i2b2 dashboard, and we have partnered with TrinetX to provide access to industry-funded clinical trials. These tools are available to all UB researchers; access is granted through our web portal. We also provide hosting services for secure storage and collection of sensitive health care information.

We safeguard protected health information (PHI) data by employing multilayered security, including a scalable, virtual PC environment that can be tailored, based on user requirements, for Microsoft Windows or Linux to run researchers’ tools. This virtual environment is flexible and can be expanded as requirements change.

A smaller development and test environment also is available for development purposes.

701 Ellicott St.
Buffalo, NY 14203