A glimpse inside IBM Watson Health

Computing giant IBM made waves at the HIMSS15 Annual Conference & Exhibition in Chicago when it announced its plans to form a dedicated healthcare arm.

The new organization, based in Boston and includes partnerships with Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic, will create a cloud to crunch and analyze medical data and to provide insight into population health and medical trends. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company has also acquired Cleveland, Ohio-based data aggregation company Explorys and Dallas-based Phytel, a healthcare services company that provides feedback to physicians and patients for follow-up care.

But what does that mean immediately moving forward? Obviously, IBM Watson Health won't start providing analytics reports tomorrow.

Anil Jain, MD, senior vice president and CMO of Explorys, said the opportunity of working with IBM will allow Explorys to spread its information more broadly. Watson can scan millions of documents in seconds, so the sped-up analysis of the data that Explorys draws from 50 million patient records will be able to much more efficiently provide insights, Dr. Jain says.

"Explorys has been working very hard to get a semantic understanding of that data, and now with our joining the IBM family, the Watson project is going to accelerate deriving meaning from the data," Dr. Jain says.

In the next few months, Explorys will be working with other partners in the IBM Watson Health group and seeing where partnerships can be driven to advance analytics and care. There is a focus on wellness and prevention, and alliances will be identified to produce better methods to detect those similarities, Dr. Jain says.

Stephen Gold, CMO of Watson, vice president of partner programs and venture capital investments at IBM, says there will be several layers of focus within the partnership: a data collection focus, an analytics focus and a solutions focus. The planning will occur through partnership within the group to address "the lion's share" of issues within those topics, he says.

"The idea here over the next several months is to bring together the details that really support the frame of the [overall] vision," Mr. Gold says. "It's one thing to lay it all out and it's another thing to actually execute."

The increasing amounts of data that clinicians are required to contend with to keep up with industry standards is unmanageable with current processes, Mr. Gold says. The point of Watson Health and its analytics strategy is to provide the data, linked with individual points as well as through trends, in a manageable format that clinicians and administrators can use. Disparate interfaces are difficult to manage, and Watson Health can bring together the data to be actionable and insightful without taking too much of the physician's time, he says.

"What we're talking about here is the democratization of medicine," Mr. Gold says. "Why should the quality of care suffer because we as an industry can't find a way to facility the flow of data, insights and actions?"

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