IBM to explore medical innovation with new Watson Health Cloud offerings
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In case its recent partnerships with CVS Health and Teva Pharmaceuticals weren’t enough evidence of IBM Watson’s growing interest in health care, the company announced today it would expanding its Watson Health Cloud offerings.
The new additions are the IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliances and the IBM Watson Care Manager. The former is a tool that can held biomedical companies efficiently bring to market medical innovations while remaining compliant with data security requirements. The latter is IBM’s population health solution, which uses an Apple-designed framework.
“IBM is dedicated to developing market leading, industry-specific cloud offerings that meet each sectors' unique needs,” IBM Watson Group SVP Michael Rhodin said. “This newest expansion of the IBM Watson Health Cloud makes it an even more robust and flexible platform for the life sciences and healthcare industries and explains its rapid adoption among leading organizations in these fields.”
With IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance, IBM is looking to allow companies to work and collaborate on their regulated workloads using a cloud infrastructure that’s compliant with regulations around preclinical studies, trial data and other data. The Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance is what IBM calls “Infrastructure-as-a-Services” way for companies to create a compliant infrastructure that complies with regulations.
“Our team spends hundreds of hours on each validated deployment documenting all infrastructure details for our life sciences clients,” Benjamin Chodroff, chief technology officer of CloudOne, an early tester of the solution, said. “The IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance will help ensure that the infrastructure, network, and platform remains stable, consistent, and thoroughly documented with the required change controls. The amount of effort required for our own highly skilled team is reduced from weeks of deployment time into a few hours."
IBM Watson Care Manager uses Apple tools like HealthKit and ResearchKit to enable providers and patients to work collaboratively to improve outcomes by integrating clinical and individual data for more personalized care. Patients can opt-in to have data collected from their wearables or wireless scales and have a care manager analyze the data, working toward more patient engagement to spot and prevent health issues.
“With the flexible workflow tools and automated patient engagement functionality, we're able to build evidence-based programs that support our care management team in delivering care to our patients,” Juie LaPrade, VP quality for inHealth, a consortium of Virginia hospitals and physician organizations, said. “This is proving to be enormously valuable in our work in accountable care and population health.”