Data Requests
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URSA Initiative in Rhode Island
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The Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics (BCBI) and the Advance RI-CTR Biomedical Informatics, Bioinformatics and Cyberinfrastructure Enhancement (BIBCE) Core serve as liaisons between researchers and health data partners to create and submit accurate and complete data requests as well as oversee the governance of health data transferred to and accessed at Brown University. Each health data partner has unique administrative processes for requesting their data as well as guidelines for working with the data and sharing results.
Please submit an Advance RI-CTR Service Request Form to start the process.
Aggregate Statistics – basic counts and descriptive statistics to characterize a population of interest (e.g., number of patients or encounters meeting specified criteria).
De-Identified Dataset – as defined by the HIPAA Privacy Rule, excludes the 18 protected health information (PHI) elements that could be used to identify individuals or the individual's relatives, employers, or household members.
Limited Dataset – as defined by the HIPAA Privacy Rule, includes a limited set of identifiable information that excludes 16 direct identifiers but may include city, state, zip code, elements of date, and other numbers, characteristics, or codes not listed as direct identifiers.
Identified Dataset – in some cases, direct identifiers may be needed (e.g., street addresses for geocoding or demographics for linking datasets) that may be subsequently removed to create a limited or de-identified dataset.
The URSA Data Request Form (UDRF) was designed by the Advance RI-CTR BIBCE Core and BCBI for requests made to Rhode Island health data partners. The UDRF is used to structure the cohort definition and dataset extraction fields in a computable manner. It can also be used to document a research study extraction specification or communicate extraction details to research team programmers. Each section should be reviewed and approved by the study PI.
Contact the Advance RI-CTR BIBCE Core via the Advance RI-CTR Service Request Form to initiate a new data request. The BIBCE Core will provide a copy of the URSA Data Request Form as well as additional data request process details.
