OUHSC Information Technology Department


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Secure Data Services

The OU Health Sciences Center will provide physical and rationale consolidation of servers as part of a larger program to provide security and privacy for mission-critical information assets, such as protected health information (PHI) as defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This consolidation will initially focus on file, print, and database (SQL) services within the context of Secure Data Services (SDS).

Introduction
In the spring of 2003, the OU Health Sciences Center executive leadership team committed the university and associate organizations to a strategy for protecting the information assets of the university and providing compliance with federal regulation for the security of personal health information. In support of this strategy, Information Technology will assist the campus with implementing multiple technical solutions including the consolidation of confidential information within a secure environment.

Secure Data Services will utilize the campus enterprise data center for housing the university's most critical information assets, including PHI. Centralizing electronic confidential in a secured data center will address many issues including increased physical security, application of uniform administrative procedures, uniform data custodial activities including backups, off-site storage, and disk drive disposal, and uniform network protection policies. The project is being implemented through several phases that include consolidated infrastructure design, implementation of a highly available data environment, stakeholder-driven services development and operations / financial modeling.