IBM 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.