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IBM and Hipaat Team to Bring Health-Information Privacy Controls

Posted on: Friday, 16 May 2008, 12:00 CDT

IBM and Hipaat, a provider of consent management solutions, have joined forces to bring health-information privacy controls to patients and care providers everywhere.

The IBM-Hipaat collaboration extends patient-driven privacy to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Personal Health Records (PHRs) and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs).

Combined IBM and Hipaat technologies allow patients to easily specify who is granted access to their personal health information (PHI), what information can be accessed and when. They enable caregivers to implement and enforce patient consent directives, providing 'break the glass' access to PHI and EHR data in emergency-care situations, where appropriate.

This commercially available patient-directed solution is a privacy-based approach to securely controlling PHI access across diverse healthcare applications and settings. When installed in HIE environments as the 'consent engine,' Privacy eSuite empowers patients and designated providers to create and record privacy directives.

The software then evaluates a provider's authorization to access a patient's PHI based on such directives. With the combined offerings, a patient can restrict a particular clinician from accessing PHI, even if that clinician - based on medical role - would typically be granted such access. All access requests are recorded and an audit trail is created.

IBM and Hipaat have integrated Hipaat's Privacy eSuite software - based on service-oriented-architecture (SOA) - with IBM's SOA Foundation for joint projects. The IBM SOA Foundation supports IBM's global healthcare strategy, which is based on the adoption of an asset-based, interoperable SOA approach and the use of open standards and standards-based EHRs to ensure secure and private exchanges of records between authorized healthcare services and benefits organizations.

Source: Datamonitor

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