Category Archives: health cloud

health, health cloud, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM Watson health launches to new cloud services to speed research

healthcare ITIBM has launched two new cloud services and a range of initiatives which aim to eliminate the worst bottlenecks of clinical research in the health sector.

The IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance is designed to help biomedical companies bring their inventions to market more efficiently. This system aims to speed up the process of meeting the pharmaceutical industry compliance regulations govern the hosting and access of data.

IBM Watson Care Manager is a population health system which aims to amalgamate features from IBM’s own Watson Health with Apple’s HealthKit and ResearchKit, which allows researchers to conduct studies using their iPhone. The new Care Manager system could allow medical professionals’ to consider a broad ranger of factors when working out a personalized patient engagement program.

IBM also announced partnerships with Boston Children’s Hospital, Columbia University, Icon, Sage Bionetworks and Teva Pharmaceuticals. It unveiled how the partners are using Watson’s cloud application to improve a number of health sector business processes, including drug discovery and development, personalized medicine, chronic disease management, pediatrics and digital health.

CVS Health, Medtronic, Yale University, Teva and Sage also announced the Watson Health Cloud is their organizations’ preferred development platform.

Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) has been named Watson Health’s foundational pediatrics partner, with IBM integrating its health cloud systems with the hospital’s OPENPediatrics initiative for sharing pediatric expertise. IBM and BCH will jointly develop commercial systems for personalized medicine, heart health and critical care. Another objective is to use Watson’s image analytics to help clinicians improve diagnoses for children with heart conditions. A third project involves using streaming analytics on data from patients on ventilation systems, in order to pre-empt patient decline.

Columbia University Medical Center is to test IBM Watson’s capacity to translate DNA insights into personalized treatment options for cancer patients. Meanwhile, clinical research organization Icon is to use Watson for clinical trial matching, which aims to speed up the process of screening the subjects of clinical trials. According to IBM 80 per cent of clinical trials fail due to inadequate patient enrolment and only 2 per cent of patients are eligible for trials.

“The IBM Watson Health Cloud can help us break down barriers that hamper progress in research,” said Sage Bionetworks president Stephen H. Friend.

health, health cloud, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce says its Health Cloud is about building relationships, not records

Salesforce has unveiled a new cloud based system aimed at helping clinicians to build stronger relationships with patients. The launch comes in the same week that UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt announced plans to give patients in England access to their entire medical record by 2018, and to let them read and add to their GP record using their smartphone within a year.

Salesforce Health Cloud (SHC) is a cloud-based patient relationship manager that aims to give health service providers a more complete picture of each patient, by integrating data from electronic medical records, wearables and other sources, such as general practitioner and hospital notes.

The service was developed in the US, where recent legislation – such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – aims to put more emphasis on improving the patient experience. According to Salesforce, wearable technology has changed the way health services are administered and new cloud apps must cater for the new expectations of patients. The SHC is designed to meet the demands of a generation of digital natives that grew up with iPhones, Facebook and FitBits who expect to use technology to manage their care. According to Salesforce’s research, 71 per cent of  ‘millennials’ (those reaching adulthood around the year 2000) want their doctors to provide a mobile app to actively manage their health. Salesforce claims that 63 per cent of them want health data extracted from their wearables to be available to their doctors.

The Health Cloud was developed with input from a variety of US-based healthcare companies, including Centura Health, DJO Global, Radboud University Medical Center, Philips and the University of California and San Francisco. Development partners included Accenture, Deloitte Digital, PwC, MuleSoft and Persistent Systems, who collectively integrated records and customised content.

Features include a Patient Caregiver Map, which can map household relationships, as well as all providers and specialists involved in a patient’s care. A ‘Today’ screen alerts caregivers to timely issues, such as missed appointments or the need to refill medications. The logic of the system is that fewer patients will fall through the cracks in any health service, an issue that Salesforce Chatter – an internal social networking tool – aims to combat through a review process for internal health service conversations.

“The era of precision healthcare is upon us,” said Joshua Newman, Chief Medical Officer for Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences.