New Uses, Clients for IBM Watson Health

IBM’s Watson Health supercomputer has two new services and four new partners.


IBM’s Watson Health supercomputer has two new services and four new partners.

The Watson Health Cloud for Life Compliance service, enables biomedical firms to build their own applications, products and analytics to support clinical trials management without having their own data center to manage, says Kathy McGroddy Goetz, vice president of partnerships and solutions at IBM Watson Health. The service was specifically designed to support a heavily regulated environment.

Also See: Watson Health is ‘Our Moonshot’ in Healthcare

Watson Care Manager is a population health management system using Apple apps to enable consumers to collect and share data from Apple health apps with clinicians to support patient engagement. Leveraging IBM’s recent acquisitions of care management vendor Phytel and population health analytics vendor Explorys, Care Manager holds data on 90 million lives. Using Apple HealthKit, data can be moved from a device to a cloud application. Using Apple ResearchKit, providers can better manage the signing up of patients for clinical trials. In total, Care Manager supports development of personalized patient engagement programs to improve individual outcomes.

New partners of Watson Health include:

* Boston Children’s Hospital as a foundational pediatrics partner, enabling clinicians to ask Watson questions on treatment options and get answers and to disseminate best practices worldwide. The hospital and IBM will jointly develop and commercialize applications covering personalized medicine, heart health and critical care. They also may use Watson Genomic Analytics to assist researchers and physicians in treating rare pediatric diseases.

* Columbia University’s cancer center will use Watson to translate DNA insights into personalized treatment options for patients. It is the 16th cancer center to use Watson Genomic Analytics to support precision medicine.

* ICON plc, a clinical research organization in Ireland, is the first CRO to use Watson to help providers match patients to appropriate clinical trials. Importantly, the project also will help ICON identify patients who meet criteria for particular trials, as an estimated 80 percent of trials fail or are delayed because of poor patient enrollment, and only two percent of eligible patients today actually become trial subjects. “This is about making trials more efficient and a lot faster,” Kathy McGroddy Goetz says.

* Sage Bionetworks, a not-for-profit organization offering an open biomedical research platform to support collaboration using open source tools and making findings, will use Watson Health Cloud the platform to aggregate, store, curate and analyze data collected from Apple ResearchKit apps. The initial focus is on Parkinson’s disease and breast cancer.

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