UPDATED 07:25 EDT / APRIL 15 2015

NEWS

IBM puts Watson on course to revolutionize health care

IBM is setting out to create yet another cloud-based incarnation of Watson that will collect and analyze data from every corner of the medical field to help promote the development of new healthcare services. The task of building the platform has been assigned to a new 2,000-strong unit within the fast-rising business division group formed last year to expand the applications of the artificial intelligence engine.

Watson is already being used by leading-edge institutions such as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Mayo Clinic in advanced treatment research, adoption that the ambitious push aims to spread to the rest of the healthcare industry. It’s a continuation of IBM CEO Virginia Rometty’s efforts to turn the Jeopardy!-winning machine into a $10 billion business over the next few years that, if executed according to plan, will culminate in a new way for medical practitioners to perform their work.

The aptly-named Watson Health Cloud is envisioned as an environment for connecting doctors with their peers in other parts of the field to create personalized treatment plans customized to meet the specific needs of each patient. The platform will be based on the technologies that IBM gained through the purchase of  Curam Software Ltd. three years ago and two new acquisitions announced in conjunction with the launch of the initiative.

The first, the Texas-based Phytel Inc., has developed a suite of cloud services designed to help providers coordinate the management of patients and everything that entails –  from making follow-up appointments to scheduling discharges – across departments. The other company that’s merging into the new Watson Health unit is Explorys Inc., a spin-off from the Cleveland Clinic – one of the first major healthcare institutions to have adopted the artificial intelligence – that offers a managed medical research and analytics environment.

But IBM is less interested in the latter’s technology than the more than 315 million clinical, financial, and operational records that organizations are analyzing on the platform. Watson Health Cloud will integrate the back-end data of providers with patient information from previously untapped sources like mobile devices, which CEO Rometty plans to obtain through the partnership her company struck with Apple last year.

IBM’s healthcare push will see the alliance expanded beyond joint development of business services for iOS to making information in applications based on the mobile giant’s medical data management frameworks, HealthKit and Research Kit, accessible via Watson Health Cloud. Once it’s inside the platform, organizations will have the ability to incorporate that data into their analytic processes, research-related as well as operational, and push the results back out to the patient’s device.

One of the first customers that plans to take advantage of the mobile functionality is Johnson & Johnson, which will use the service to power a series of new apps set to provide personalized training guides for patients recovering from joint replacement and spinal surgeries. Medtronic plc, the world’s third largest maker of medical devices, will also adopt Watson Health Cloud to analyze patient data from installations of its equipment for care customization purposes.

The fact that IBM already managed to land two Fortune 500 clients before even officially launching the platform is a positive sign. But the question of whether the company will be able to keep up that mometum for long enough to reach its CEO’s ambitious revenue goals for Watson remains very much open.


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