Evaluate Your Project | The SHIRE Platform

The SHIRE is designed to meet the needs of a wide variety of analysis projects, but not every project. For compliance reasons, its use is required for certain types of projects. Other projects may not be required to use the SHIRE but may wish to opt in anyhow to take advantage of its scalable compute capabilities. Read on below to determine if the SHIRE is right for your project, or whether one of our available alternatives is a better fit.

Using the SHIRE is required if:

You are using EHR data from UNC Health as part of your project AND

Your dataset has patient identifiers or is HIPAA limited AND

Your project involves data analysis (as opposed to simply viewing data, such as a patient list for chart review or trial recruitment)

If you don’t meet these criteria but still want to use the SHIRE to leverage its computing capabilities (e.g. you have a very large set of deidentified data you want to analyze), you may request to opt in when you put in your CDWH request. However, projects that do not use CDWH data at all are not currently eligible to use the SHIRE.

Note that if your request involves getting a list of patients for trial recruitment or chart review, we have a temporary workflow in place through August of 2026 to enable those projects to remain on the CDWH network drive instead of the SHIRE. We plan to transition to a new location later in 2026. Until then, your CDWH analyst will make sure you have instructions as to where to find your data when it’s ready.

Using the SHIRE requires funding. The costs are variable depending on the complexity of your project and we provided access to tools to estimate and manage your SHIRE budget.

If your project does not require the SHIRE, there may be a better fit for supporting your data access needs. If you’re not sure which option is best, feel free to request a consult from the NC TraCS IDSci team.