The DCC provides several services to School of Medicine research activities, contingent upon the availability of sufficient resources on both DCC and project ends. These services can be divided broadly into several categories. 

Planning

DCC personnel work with investigators to plan for their needs as they pertain to data. The ideal engagement occurs at the time a project is being conceived or a grant application is being written, rather than later, although we realize this may not be possible for some projects. The planning phase involves:

• Determining the duration and requirements of the project
• Determining how the investigators would interact with project data. A guiding principle is that data that are stored are meant to be retrieved conveniently!
• Estimating the resources needed for a project in terms of hardware, software and personnel
• Charting a time line for execution of the deliverables with specified milestones
• Reviewing the involvement of the DCC after the project funding ceases

Infrastructure

The DCC infrastructure enables us to provide the following technological capabilities to clients.

• Modern database management with entry and access over the Web when necessary with rigorous attention to the quality of the data
• Establishment and maintenance of databases that can be scaled to increase in size seamlessly as they evolve in terms of hardware, algorithms, and needs of particular projects
• Development of tools for rapid prototyping of data forms and relationships among sources of data, including porting data from laboratory instrumentation to integrated central databases
• Provision of access to various secondary databases, including extensive links to publicly available databases

Security

The DCC provides investigators with a secure environment to store their data. Attention is paid to both physical security (locks and keys) and to the security of data (on site and off-site backups, encryption, authentication, role-based access). The DCC uses Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connections when providing researchers to role-based access the data over the web. Security procedures are continuously monitored and upgraded as necessary. The DCC works with the Stanford University Privacy and Data Security Officer to comply with all HIPAA regulations as they pertain to a project. 

Science and Education

The DCC has close connections with the Division of Biostatistics, the Department of Statistics and the Department of Genetics. The DCC brings developments in computer-intensive statistical inference to bear upon our data. Our collaborations have resulted in production of widely used tools such as enhancements to CART R (Olshen et. al.), and original development of SAM (Tibshirani, Narasimhan et.al.) and PAM (Hastie, Tibshirani, Narasimhan, et. al.).
DCC personnel are also involved in education of colleagues and investigators. Our staff have given seminars and lectures on data management security in classrooms and seminars as opportunities permit.