Any individual acting on behalf of a researcher or study team to extract and provide data to the research team is acting as an Honest Broker and must be certified as such moving forward.
What an Honest Broker Does
- Serves as a neutral intermediary between the research team and the source data.
- Uses job-related access to retrieve, transform, and provide data for research purposes.
- Helps protect subject confidentiality while enabling research.
- Ensures researchers receive only the minimally necessary information for the study.
- May maintain linkages that support re-identification only when proper authorization is in place.
- May provide de-identified data, limited data sets, or identified patient data (PHI), depending on the approved need.
Advocate Health has an enterprise-wide certification process for individuals who serve as Honest Brokers for research. The responsibilities of the role and the steps to become certified are outlined in the Advocate Health Enterprise Honest Broker Certification for Research Policy, available in PolicyTech.
Certification Requirements
- Complete the required certification application (< 1 hour to complete).
- Obtain approval from the Honest Broker Approval Committee.
- Maintain certification through annual education, attestation, and reporting of Honest Broker activities completed during the prior year.
If you are working in as an Honest Broker and are not yet certified, please seek certification immediately. For more information, please visit this webpage.