IBM Opens Up New Health Data Venture
IBM has established a new business venture called Watson Health, aimed at providing comprehensive data analytics to the health care sector.
Reuters reports the new unit “plans to aggregate health information from a large numbers of devices and providers and offer insights to health companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic.”
J&J; will work with IBM to create a tool for enhancing patient care for knee and hip replacement surgery derived from this data, whereas Medtronic will implement the statistics Watson Health culls together to make personalized care plans for diabetes patients, according to The New York Times.
Apple is also mentioned as a partner in this endeavor. IBM will help the titan of technology enhance its medical software, HealthKit and ResearchKit.
HealthKit is a repository of health data produced by usage from fitness applications while ResearchKit lets scientists create diagnostic health apps for iPhones, therefore creating a vast network of health information for medical researchers to utilize for studying diseases like diabetes and Parkinson’s.
IBM’s Senior Vice President of Research Labs and Initiatives John E. Kelley told The New York Times, “We want to be the analytics brains behind HealthKit and ResearchKit.”
Scientists will be able to harness Watson Health’s suite of tools to form important conclusions on medical treatments from the millions of anonymous data points being generated through Apple’s framework, as long as they have permission from these users.
This division of the technology company will operate out of Boston.
