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American Well Team Expands Agreement with IBM

By Raju Shanbhag
TMCnet Contributor

In an effort to protect patient information that is collected and exchanged as part of live Online Care consultations with healthcare providers, American Well entered into an expanded partnership with IBM.

IBM (News - Alert) helps organizations build a strong security posture that helps reduce costs, improve service, and manage risk.

To facilitate Online Care services that allow patients to connect live and on-demand with primary care and specialty physicians, American Well partners with major health plans, delivery networks and pharmacy chains. Patients no longer have to travel great distances to get proper medical attention as Online Care makes use of this growing type of telehealth consultation, the company stated.

“Telehealth and Online Care are emerging areas that will have a significant impact on how care is delivered – extending the reach of better care and making it possible for more patients to get the care they need when they need it," said Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, in a press release. "With this smarter system also comes the need to protect patient, provider and physician data.”

To create even more secure applications for the company's telehealth system from the start, IBM will help American Well further integrate its professional security services and skills into their application development process as part of the expanded partnership. IBM helps American Well to develop more secure, customized versions of its Online Care application for each client, the company has stated. In 2008, the American Well selected IBM to perform in-depth application vulnerability assessments for several of their customer, patient, and provider web applications.

Recently, the company signed a major deal with Finland’s leading supplier of IT banking and related support services, Samlink. Samlink selected IBM to manage the information technology (IT) infrastructure for the company's more than 400 bank branch offices across Finland. In the release, IBM announced that this five-year agreement was signed this month. Earlier, in November 2010, these two companies had signed an IT agreement.