Protecting Your Privacy

We take every precaution to safeguard you and your medical information:

• Protecting the confidentiality of medical records is the law. We keep any information that identifies you or your material confidential.
• Whenever possible, researchers connect information from your medical records to your tissue or blood using a code rather than your name.
• If researchers need to use some identifying information about you for their research, they must undergo an approval process by a special committee that is responsible protecting research participants.
• We make every effort to ensure that your genetic information from research is not available to any of your caregivers and is not included in your medical record. This helps make sure that outsiders, such as insurance companies or employers, do not discover anything about your genes.
• Researchers at Yale sometimes work with colleagues at other universities and research sites to develop new treatments. We make every effort to ensure your identity and information are never released to researchers outside of Yale. Your materials are provided to outside researchers either anonymously or with a code that only Yale researchers know.