CVS, IBM to Tackle Problem of Managing Chronic Conditions

Retail pharmacy CVS Health and tech giant IBM have teamed to use predictive analytics and IBM’s Watson supercomputer to enable healthcare providers and insurers to better manage care for patients with chronic diseases.


Retail pharmacy CVS Health and tech giant IBM have teamed to use predictive analytics and IBM’s Watson supercomputer to enable healthcare providers and insurers to better manage care for patients with chronic diseases.

According to the announcement, the partnership brings together IBM’s Watson Health Cloud and cognitive computing capabilities with both companies’ expertise in predictive analytics and patient engagement, as well as CVS Health’s experience in medication adherence and pharmacy care.

By leveraging information from electronic health records, pharmacy and medical claims, as well as fitness devices, the companies say their joint technology solution will enable providers and payers to “quickly and easily gain insights” from the data to “help individuals stay on track with their care and meet health goals.”

The offering is specifically targeted at the employer/health plan market to: predict individuals at risk for declining health who may benefit from proactive, customized engagement programs; encourage patients to adopt safe and healthy behaviors, including adherence to prescribed medicines and healthy lifestyle regimens; and suggest appropriate use of cost-effective primary care and out-patient providers.

Also See: Cancer Centers, Epic to Tap Power of IBM Watson Supercomputer

“This partnership will enable us to leverage advanced technologies and key health information to develop a tool that can be applied by a variety of healthcare providers such as pharmacists, nurse practitioners at MinuteClinics or connected healthcare providers, and that can help our pharmacy benefit management clients improve member health and manage cost,” said Troyen A. Brennan, M.D., chief medical officer for CVS Health.

But, not everyone is impressed with the CVS-IBM announcement.

“While solutions like IBM Watson are useful in that they can take care of the ‘heavy lifting’ around data analysis, the challenge for health systems isn’t just uncovering insights, it’s that they aren’t currently equipped to make those insights actionable,” said Ronald Razmi, M.D., CEO of Acupera, a San Francisco-based population health management workflow vendor. “Analytics aren’t enough—health systems need to go a step further and work on ways to surface those insights in workflows, in real time. That’s the only way care teams will be able to better manage a population’s health at scale.”

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