AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced the availability of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant computing and data systems for all University of Texas System medical researchers and their collaborators. HIPAA is the federal law that protects personalized health information (PHI).

"We're very excited to receive the authority to operate with HIPAA data as it enables us to help medical researchers provide new capabilities that advance current and future research efforts across all UT institutions. Researchers with PHI data can now access the same resources at TACC that researchers in other fields have always had access to," Stanzione said.

TACC is now able to accept HIPAA compliant data sets for use on TACC platforms, specifically the Lonestar supercomputer and Corral storage system, which are available to all UT System researchers through the UT Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) initiative. "We anticipate that other TACC systems will be HIPAA compliant in the near future."

UTRC, which provides advanced computational systems, large data storage, and high bandwidth data access, enables researchers within all 15 UT System institutions to collaborate with each other. This collaboration often involves sharing confidential, patient-specific data sets. With this development, TACC can now work with research data that is associated with patients without going through de-identification and other processes that make it much more difficult to connect research discoveries with patient outcomes.

"TACC's new ability to handle PHI data is a huge advance for the UTRC program and researchers at all of our UT campuses who work with clinical datasets," said Patricia Hurn, vice chancellor for Research and Innovation, The University of Texas System.

In addition, TACC is authorized to work with FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) data. This act categorizes information and information systems according to risk level. Recent industry studies show that a majority of organizations (51 percent) still consider their effectiveness in securing data and applications in the cloud to be "low," with only 26 percent rating their effectiveness as "high." TACC secures data at the FISMA-moderate level. FISMA accreditation is based on three primary security objectives: the confidentiality, integrity and availability of systems and data.

"Overall, this compliance with HIPAA and FISMA opens up a new frontier of clinical data sets and different kinds of research," Stanzione said. "Medical researchers who have increasingly needed large-scale resources but have never been able to use them are now able to do so."

TACC is one of the leading centers of computational excellence in the United States. The center's mission is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies.