Collaborate with us Umbrella Institutional Review Board
Leveraging our expertise in data science methodologies and ethical considerations, we assist researchers preparing Institutional Review Board (IRB) applications by advising on data collection methods, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations and ethical guidelines, and providing guidance on data management and analysis plans. Collaborating closely with researchers, we help to streamline the IRB approval process, ensuring that studies involving data analysis adhere to the highest standards of ethical conduct and data privacy. Our goal is to support researchers in conducting rigorous and ethically sound research while harnessing the power of data science to advance knowledge and innovation across various domains.
Umbrella IRB
Traditionally, IRBs require a project-specific protocol in which the investigator must specify the data he or she wishes to abstract, the planned analyses, and the results to be reported. However, these requirements are not always compatible with the “big data science” approach—such projects are often exploratory and use a variety of algorithms that are difficult to specify in advance.
For these reasons, we now offer an umbrella IRB for researchers with a Texas Children’s affiliation. They may access our clinical data without project-specific IRB approval so long as (1) the data will not leave our servers; (2) no identifiable data will be transferred to individual researchers off the server or published; and (3) there will be no contact with patients (e.g., to collect additional data.) To learn more, contact us below.
Texas Children's Hospital researchers can submit a ticket here.
Baylor College of Medicine researchers can submit a ticket here.
Researchers from other institutions can contact us at researchdata@texaschildrens.org