UPDATED 03:18 EDT / APRIL 25 2014

Sharing (data) is caring: IBM launches Watson Cloud services for healthcare

5646119276_112d13d792Enterprise giant IBM has announced a fresh wave of investment in its US Federal Healthcare Practice in order to address the technology needs of public sector health institutions.

Big Blue will add Big Data and cognitive computing services to its health care clients, delivered via the Watson Cloud. These services will include diagnostics and research, patient interaction and data visualizations.

In addition, IBM has made its Advanced Care Insights available to healthcare providers in order to help them gather more clinical, behavioral and social data. This software will rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and IBM Content Analytics technology to crunch together unstructured data from sources like lab results, physician’s notes and elsewhere, allowing healthcare providers to query it.

Besides this, CNN reports that IBM has also teamed up with the New York Genome Center to tackle a highly ambitious goal – beating glioblastoma, a rare and highly aggressive form of brain cancer.

IBM will dedicate some of its best Big Data resources to battling brain cancer, crunching numbers from electronic records to boost doctor coordination, recognize disease patterns and assist with diagnosis.

Technology already exists to help doctors come up with DNA-based treatments for cancer patients, but this is a time-consuming and difficult process. It involves doctors correlating data from a patient’s unique genome sequence with clinical record and scientific journal data. And that’s where its Watson supercomputer can help – Watson is able to analyze the data of thousands of patients, matching symptoms with gene mutations and helping to come up with medical solutions.

Finally, IBM has announced the appointment of Dr. Keith Salzman as its new Chief Medical Information Officer. Salzman previously worked in the Department of Defense military health system for two decades.

ZDNet suggests that this is all part of IBM’s efforts to get involved with the Department of Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) project. The company hasn’t stated publicly it wants to be involved, few are better positioned to serve as an integrator to direct the project.

photo credit: quinn.anya via photopin cc

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU