ARMONK, NY – IBM and HIPAAT, Inc., a provider of consent management solutions, have partnered to offer a consent management solution designed to put privacy back into the hands of the patient.

The IBM-HIPAAT collaboration extends patient-driven privacy to Electronic Medical Records, Electronic Health Records, Personal Health Records and Health Information Exchanges.

The companies are integrating HIPAAT's Privacy eSuite software - based on Service Oriented Architecture - 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.

"IBM is playing an important role in the infrastructure that is needed in order to facilitate the sharing of health information," said Tom Romeo, vice president of federal global business services at IBM. "What HIPAAT brings to the table is privacy - a layer of protection for the patient - which is mandatory in healthcare."

Barry Runyon, vice president of research at Gartner, said using IBM's SOA framework would leverage the company's presence in HIEs and other stand-alone care delivery systems.

"They aren't trying to re-invent the wheel, but are rather integrating, which makes it a lot easier," the analysts said.