Overview of BRC Clinical Records Interactive Search (CRIS) Usage Regulations:

Background
CRIS provides a means of analysing anonymised data from the South London & Maudsley Foundation NHS Trust (SLaM) electronic case records. Ethical approval for such analyses was provided by South Central - Oxford C Research Ethics Committee (REC) in September 2008 for an initial 5-year period and renewed in 2013, 2018, and 2023. Access to clinical information is clearly a sensitive issue and a security model was developed which has been considered and approved by the SLaM Caldicott Guardian and the Trust Executive, as well as forming part of the ethics application, this is available to view here.

Security requirements of CRIS use
CRIS can only be accessed from the SLaM network. Data from CRIS must be kept within the Trust firewall and must only be saved on the CRIS shared drive on SLaM computers. CRIS data MUST NOT be saved on personal or encrypted USB sticks. 

CRIS data MUST NOT be emailed from SLaM machines to your personal email or King’s email. 

Please be aware that all CRIS data must be analysed within the SLaM firewall. You are not allowed to analysis CRIS data using another organisations or your own personal statistical software on non-SLaM computers. 

Please also note that currently STATA and R are the only statistical programmes that are available with SLaM. 

The CRIS Security Model includes regular audits of searches carried out using the CRIS Front End and CRIS SQL database - all searches by all users outside of the CRIS Extraction Team are recorded and can be audited. To enable this. we keep a record of all projects submitted to the CRIS Oversight Committee along with data extraction specifications and other related documentation (e.g. free text security reviews).

Breaches of the CRIS Security Model will be considered a serious matter potentially resulting in disciplinary action.

Rationale for this application process
The CRIS Oversight Committee will review all requests to use CRIS as an anonymised database. It is important for the BRC to demonstrate that SLaM clinical data are used responsibly and for projects with demonstrable research and clinical importance.

The future of CRIS, as with other aspects of BRC research, depends on successful bids for future funding. This in turn requires evidence of use of the database, hence the need to keep a record of individual projects.