ARMONK, NY – IBM has announced an agreement with Honolulu, Hawaii-based Convergence CT to jointly market clinical data warehousing products for the healthcare and life sciences industries.

The new Clinical Data Warehouse will be based on the IBM Balanced Configuration Unit for Linuz and Convergence CT’s DB FOCUS Clinical Data Warehouse technology.

In addition, IBM and Convergence CT will market a joint solution to life sciences companies (pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device firms) based on longitudinal patient data and advanced analytics.

“One of the greatest challenges facing our healthcare clients has been gaining access to integrated patient data that meets today’s compliance requirements,” said Karen Parrish, vice president of IBM Business Intelligence Solutions, in a press release. “The combination of IBM’s Balanced Configuration Unit for Linux and Convergence CT’s DB FOCUS provides a pre-packaged Clinical Data Warehouse solution for this highly sensitive information.”

Convergence CT is also the data warehousing and analytics partner of Anceta LLC, a health informatics subsidiary of the American Medical Group Association. The three groups are collaborating with AMGA’s multi-specialty medical groups to extract, aggregate and analyze comprehensive, HIPAA-compliant patient data among participating AMGA members.

DB FOCUS creates a comprehensive patient electronic health record (EHR) by extracting data from existing hospital and clinic information systems regardless of whether they are integrated. As new patient data is entered, company officials say, the data elements are converged to the existing patient record.

The IBM BCU isa fully integrated and scalable data warehousing solution for Linux that combines software, server and storage resources.