Having access to a large quantity of reliable, organized patient data is essential in studying health care. The Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) electronic health record makes studying real patient data faster and easier for the researchers as well as completely private for patients.

To ensure the very highest level of patient privacy, the PAMF Research Institute has a completely separate computer system that only contains health care records that have been stripped of all details that could connect a specific record with an individual patient.

At the Research Institute, patient privacy is our highest priority, and we work closely with PAMF IT to ensure that our systems conform to the highest level of confidentiality.

The Research Institute is supported by two IT groups:

• PAMF Information Technology: Pathology, Serology and Research Finance are on the PAMF network.


• Tech Team to Go (TT2GO): The three research departments -- Clinical, Health Services and Health Policy -- are supported by TT2GO. Many researchers prefer using Macintosh computers, and TT2GO services both Macintosh and PC computers.

The Research Institute recently upgraded and installed servers for data transfers between PAMF's computer network and the PAMF Research Institute network. The ability to readily access terabytes (very large amounts of data equivalent to more than a million megabytes) of information independently from active patient records will help both investigators working at the Research Institute and PAMF patients and clinicians.

The PAMF Research Institute IT team can be reached at IT@pamfri.org.

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