IBM's big news: New health business unit, acquisitions, partnerships

IBM is set to make its mark in the healthcare market, making several significant announcements timed to the start of the 2015 HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition.

The company is establishing a dedicated business unit, IBM Watson Health, that will be headquartered in the Boston area. And, IBM announced the HIPAA-enabled Watson Health Cloud that will enable secure access to individualized insights and a more complete picture of the many factors that can affect people’s health. 

The new business unit and Watson cognitive computing platform include other company developments, such as the acquisitions of Explorys and Phytel to advance analytics capabilities and partnerships with Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic to help optimize consumer and medical devices for data collection, analysis and feedback, according to a release.

All the data becoming available through the growing use of fitness trackers and other sensors “presents an unprecedented opportunity to transform the ways in which we manage our health,” said John E. Kelly, III, IBM senior vice president, solutions portfolio and research. “We need better ways to tap into and analyze all of this information in real-time to benefit patients and to improve wellness globally. Only IBM has the advanced cognitive capabilities of Watson and can pull together the vast ecosystem of partners, practitioners and researchers needed to drive change, as well as to provide the open, secure and scalable platform needed to make it all possible.”

The collaborations with other companies will lead to new health-based offerings that leverage information collected from personal health, medical and fitness devices. IBM anticipates many more companies to leverage the Watson Health Cloud platform.

Johnson & Johnson will collaborate with IBM to create intelligent coaching systems centered on preoperative and postoperative patient care, including joint replacement and spinal surgery. Medtronic will leverage the Watson Health Cloud insights platform to collaborate with IBM around delivery of new highly-personalized care management solutions for people with diabetes. The solutions will receive and analyze patient information and data from various Medtronic devices including insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors, and use this information to provide dynamic, personalized diabetes management strategies to patients and their providers. 

A spin-off from the Cleveland Clinic in 2009, Explorys’ secure cloud-computing platform is used by 26 major integrated healthcare systems to identify patterns in diseases, treatments and outcomes. It integrates more than 315 billion clinical, financial and operational data elements, spanning 50 million unique patients, 360 hospitals and more than 317,000 providers. Market intelligence firm IDC just named Explorys global leader in Healthcare Clinical and Financial Analysis.

Phytel develops and sells cloud-based services that help healthcare providers and care teams work together to ensure care is effective and coordinated in order to meet new healthcare quality requirements and reimbursement models. It was just named the leader in the population health management category by the 2014 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services. 

Terms were not disclosed for either deal.

IBM and Apple will expand their partnership with IBM Watson Health Cloud to provide a secure cloud platform and analytics for Apple's HealthKit and ResearchKit, according to a company announcement. This will support health data entered by customers in iOS apps and also arm medical researchers with a secure, open data storage solution with access to IBM's most sophisticated data analytics capabilities. IBM will de-identify and store health data in a secure, scalable cloud system that enables researchers to access and share data in an open ecosystem environment, as well as have access to IBM's data-mining and predictive analytics capabilities. Health and fitness app developers and medical researchers will be able to draw on data at a scale that until now has never been available.

IBM will also build a suite of enterprise wellness apps using HealthKit. These IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps will be designed for enterprises to work with their employees to better manage their health needs across acute diseases to general fitness.