IBM's new Health Corps to connect tech with public health initiatives around the globe

IBM unveiled its new corporate citizenship program called the IBM Health Corps, which will bring IBM's top talent and cognitive technologies to help communities address health challenges such as primary care gaps, health worker shortages and access to safe water and nutritious food.

The program plans to dispatch IBM's leading innovators with expertise in data, analytics and artificial intelligence to work alongside public health leaders to understand their challenges and implement sustainable, data-driven solutions for health problems identified by the communities themselves, according to the announcement.

IBM plans to pilot the Health Corps in a project with Unity Health Care in May. Based in Washington, D.C., Unity, one of the nation's largest community health centers, provides primary care to more than 100,000 underserved residents through its 26 local clinics, including those based in schools and homeless shelters. As the health community increasingly recognizes the need to bridge the gap between siloed health care services, Unity plans to integrate behavioral health into its primary care practices. Unity believes that this could benefit individuals whose emotional or behavioral health issues exacerbate their other chronic diseases. It may also lower emergency and long-term health expenses. The Health Corps team will be tasked with creating an operational blueprint for piloting and scaling a model for clinics that combines both primary and behavioral healthcare within each care team.

Later this year following a competitive proposal process, IBM will select five communities to receive the expertise of IBM's best problem-solving teams equipped with relevant health and technical expertise in disciplines such as cognitive, cloud, mobile and social computing; predictive analytics; medicine and population health, who will analyze the local health challenges, then recommend detailed solutions. IBM will accept applications through April 20.

IBM already has completed two successful pilot programs in late 2015. In Calderdale, UK, more than 65 percent of adults are overweight or obese so IBM Health Corps partnered with the Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council to help tailor its health outreach and design specialized physical activity programs. The IBM team used cognitive technology to analyze unstructured data, such as social workers' case notes, to help officials identify the unique needs of vulnerable populations, including foster youth and elderly residents, to help them make better health decisions and increase their levels of physical activity. 

In Johannesburg, South Africa, IBM Health Corps collaborated with Africa Health Placements to address acute physician shortages. IBM built a mobile-enabled application that will allow clinic and hospital administrators to directly report staffing needs to the government in real time. The team also built a mathematical model for use by health managers and policy makers to analyze and visualize the data captured from the facilities and better deploy medical staff. Together, these technologies aim to facilitate better short- and long-term staffing decisions, potentially leading to better health outcomes, decreased patient wait times and more equitable healthcare for communities. 

Learn more about the Health Corps pilot projects on the IBM THINK Blog.