The Honest Broker Policy was established to create standard operating procedures for de-identification of PHI for the purpose of safely and securely linking together or sharing clinical data to support research in compliance with HIPAA and IRB requirements. Both Nebraska Medicine (IM40) and UNMC (6074) have Honest Broker Policies.

Honest Brokers facilitate access to patient health information. Honest Brokers are workforce members who are Neutral Intermediaries (persons or systems). They are certified to:

• Collect specified health information from the tissue or data bank
• Remove all patient identifiers
• Provide the de-identified health information or tissue to research investigators, clinicians, or other healthcare workforce members, in such a manner that it cannot be reasonably possible for any individual to identify the patients directly or indirectly

Honest Brokers shall not be part of the research team for which they are performing honest broker services. There are appointment and training criteria, in addition to submitting an application and signing an attestation of agreement required to become an Honest Broker.

If you have a dataset of clinical information AND you provide information for research purposes you may need to apply to become an Honest Broker. The application can be found at: http://www.unmc.edu/hipaa/policies/