Data Mining Competition To Improve Drug Safety 36
An anonymous reader writes "The OMOP Cup is a competition to find new methods for detecting drug side effects. There have been several cases over the last few years where drugs have had issues that haven't been detected for years after they were released. The proliferation of electronic medical records and pharmacy claims provides a large and potentially powerful new data source for faster detection. The problem is that the techniques for doing this on a large scale are immature. The OMOP Cup is trying to help fix that. They've already given out $5,000 for top methods, and there's $15,000 still up for grabs."
Re:HIPAA anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
This strikes me as a huuuuuge breach of medical record confidentiality. Where exactly do they plan to legally get enough medical records to mine in the first place?
As long as eighteen HIPAA identifiers are removed, the data is considered deidentified by HIPAA. Deidentified data does not need patients' consent. De-identified data-only studies only need the hospital IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval. Believe me, it's not an easy task to get the IRB approval.
Here's the list of the 18 HIPAA identifiers [uvm.edu].