As part of its efforts to advance the quality and effectiveness of personal healthcare, IBM has established a dedicated health unit to be headquartered in the Boston area, IBM Watson Health, which is anchored by the Watson Health Cloud — a secure and open platform for physicians, researchers, insurers and companies focused on health and wellness solutions.
IBM Watson Health's mission is based on the concept that the individual should be placed at the center of efforts to improve health outcomes, and that by sharing data society can achieve better health for all. The HIPAA-enabled Watson Health Cloud platform will provide secure access to individualized insights and a more complete portrait of the numerous factors affecting people's health. It allows personal health data to be anonymized, shared and combined with a dynamic and constantly growing aggregated view of clinical, research and social health data.
"All this data can be overwhelming for providers and patients alike, but it also presents an unprecedented opportunity to transform the ways in which we manage our health," said John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president of 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."
To extend the company's Watson cognitive computing platform, IBM is entering into new partnerships with Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic to help optimize consumer and medical devices for data collection, analysis and feedback. IBM is acquiring Explorys and Phytel to improve its healthcare analytics capabilities.