IBM to improve healthcare

IBM

IBM has announced that it is to dedicate $100 million to a global initiative to "improve healthcare quality and costs." The plan will see the company utilize some of its leading scientists and technologists to help medical practitioners and insurance companies provide high-quality, evidence-based care to patients.

The initiative would see IBM work with medical institutions as well as hiring doctors to work alongside its staff as consultants, while developing "new technologies, scientific advancements and business processes for healthcare and insurance providers."

The $100 million will be spent over three years and will be invested in sectors such as integration, services research, cloud computing, analytics and emerging scientific areas - such as nanomedicine and computational biology - to drive innovations that empower practitioners to focus their efforts on patient care.

Worldwide research

The news, which was announced on news-medical.net, states that over 100 researchers, across IBM's nine worldwide research laboratories and its collaboratories in Melbourne, Australia, and Taipei, Taiwan, will contribute to the initiative.

The three main areas of focus will include:

• Evidence generation, which uses scientific methods to utilize health data to help develop effective treatment methodologies, and then deliver it in a context-dependant and personalized way at the point of care;
• Improving service quality through simplifying the healthcare delivery process; and
• New incentives and models to shift the healthcare system to one that rewards based on patient outcomes rather than only treatment and volume of care.

IBM expects to hire several physicians, clinicians, nurses, engineers, economists and social scientists to help in this areas as well as seeking new research collaborations with businesses, governments and universities.

"Improving the quality of healthcare requires more than just digitizing health data," said Chalapathy Neti, Global Lead, Healthcare Transformation at IBM Research. "In fact the proliferation of diagnostics technology has in many ways added another layer of complexity, making it more difficult to gain valuable insights for patient care. Enabling greater coordination between care providers and transforming data into clinical decision intelligence could improve patient outcomes and help lower costs of healthcare today."

Relevant articles:

Healthcare facilities to get $795m broadband investment | US loses out in healthcare study | Medical costs to jump for employers

Like this article? Get the RSS feed: