IBM introduced expanded capabilities for the Watson Platform for Health Cloud and a specialized Watson Health Consulting Services unit dedicated to helping clients and partners across the healthcare ecosystem capture the business opportunity of cognitive computing in healthcare.
“As our clients look to accelerate the digitization of business processes, unlock new value from their health data and infuse new intelligence to transform their enterprise, they need a cloud platform that is built to specifically address the unique needs of the healthcare and life sciences industry,” Lori Steele, IBM Global Managing Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences, said in a statement.
New Watson Health cloud offerings and capabilities include:
- IBM Mobile Foundation support – which will ease the process of building HIPAA-enabled mobile applications that work with Watson Health.
- Watson Platform for Health GxP – a data platform fully managed under the Watson Health Quality Management System to help organizations reduce the risks, costs and time associated with compliance to FDA and global regulations.
- IBM Watson Annotator for Clinical Data – a cognitive service that allows companies to unlock critical information in unstructured data — such as physician notes, discharge summaries, and pathology reports — to deliver domain specific insights on information such as symptoms, disease, allergies, and medication to help drive insights for care.
- Global Expansion – Watson Health is pleased to announce availability of the Cloud Platform for Health in not only in the US, but also in the Softlayer data center in London. IBM recently announced it was tripling its Cloud Data Center capacity in London.
As for the mentioned Watson Health Consulting Services unit, it will help clients transform healthcare by leveraging the power of cognitive solutions. The new global group includes a variety of consulting professionals who specialize in healthcare data science, analytics, machine learning, advanced population health, real-world evidence, clinical workflow, drug discovery process design and development, user experience, clinical workflow, and more. The team works with clients around the globe to form new strategies to improve care, identify how cognitive solutions fit into these strategies, quickly implement these new cognitive solutions, and transform their processes and operations to fully take advantage of the new these new capabilities.
IBM has also announced the expansion of the Watson Health medical imaging collaborative to 24 organizations worldwide, adding clinical and industry expertise for the worldwide initiative already tackling eye, brain, breast, heart and related conditions.
The Watson Health medical imaging collaborative is an initiative comprised of leading health systems, academic medical centers, private radiology practices, ambulatory radiology providers, and imaging technology companies that are finding ways to use medical imaging to identify and predict the risk of cancer, diabetes, and diseases of the eye, brain and heart and related conditions.
New collaborative members include Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin, IDx LLC, PrivaCors, Strategic Radiology, Sutter Health, Pacific Radiology Group, University of Michigan and University of Virginia Health System join founding members Agfa HealthCare, Anne Arundel Medical Center, Baptist Health South Florida, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Hologic, Inc., ifa systems AG, inoveon, Radiology Associates of South Florida, Sentara Healthcare, Sheridan Healthcare, Topcon, UC San Diego Health, University of Miami Health System, University of Vermont Health Network, vRad, a MEDNAX company, and Merge, an IBM company.
Finally, Watson Health will debut Watson Clinical Imaging Review service that can review medical data including images to help healthcare providers identify the most critical cases that require attention. It uses cognitive text analytics to read structured and unstructured information in a cardiologist’s medical report, combines that with a variety of data from other sources (e.g. EMR problem list), and extracts relevant information to verify key data, including the diagnosis, is accurately reflected throughout the health record.
The first application for the offering is cardiovascular disease, starting with a common condition called aortic stenosis (AS), with plans to add nine additional cardiovascular conditions, such as myocardial infarctions (heart attacks), valve disorders, cardiomyopathy (disease of the heart muscle), and deep vein thrombosis.