IBM has announced new partnerships and digital health solutions and a new home base for its Watson Health program as it seeks to make cognitive computing and big data a mainstay in the healthcare landscape.
The company is opening a global headquarters for IBM Watson Health in Cambridge, Mass., and will be working with Boston Children's Hospital, Columbia University, Sage Bionetworks, Teva Pharmaceuticals and ICON plc on a number of initiatives ranging from chronic disease management and pediatrics to clinical research and population health.
"Watson Health is driving a new era of technology-driven health, enabling entrepreneurs and industry leaders to address diverse needs, spanning the earliest stages of research all the way through to clinical care and population health through to consumer wellness," Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Watson Group, said in a prepared release. "The variety of new partners and use cases underscores the flexibility and scalability of the IBM Watson Health Cloud to help leaders rapidly advance the state of the art in health and wellness."
Boston Children's Hospital, already a partner with IBM in other initiatives, will be integrating Watson in its OPENPediatrics program, which seeks to incorporate big data and analytics for personalized medicine, critical care and heart health. BCH researchers will also use Watson Genomic Analytics in research on rare pediatric diseases.
At Columbia University Medical Center, IBM Watson will be used by oncologists at the Columbia Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center to develop personalized cancer care treatment programs based on DNA analysis. Columbia becomes the 16th cancer center to use Watson Genomic Analytics to develop precision medicine platforms.
Those healthcare networks and others partnering with IBM will make use of IBM Watson Care Manager, a new platform combining Watson Health with Apple's ResearchKit and HealthKit platforms to develop personalized patient engagement tools.
IBM Watson Health's work with ICON, Sage Bionetworks and Teva Pharmaceuticals focuses on the company's IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance, which is designed to advance and improve clinical and research trials. Officials say an estimated 80 percent of all clinical trials are delayed or ultimately fail because of patient enrollment issues, and only 2 percent of eligible patients actually become trial subjects.
"Clinical trials are crucial in the drug and treatment development process," Sean Hogan, vice president and general manager of IBM Healthcare, said in a separate press release. "Through cognitive computing and cloud-based data, our goal is to help our clients accelerate the time it takes to complete clinical trials and reach conclusive trial results."
Steve Cutler, chief operating officer of Dublin, Ireland based ICON, added that recruiting enough patients to clinical trials is an ongoing challenge.
"By applying IBM Watson to our clinical trials, we have the potential to revolutionize clinical trial feasibility, patient recruitment and study start-up timelines," Cutler said in a separate release. "We are also providing a better and faster way to connect patients with clinical trials that are most relevant to them."
Teva Pharmaceuticals officials said they'll use the IBM Watson Health Cloud research on complex and chronic conditions, ranging from asthma to neurodegenerative diseases, and hope to have solutions ready for market in 2016.
The latest partners join a growing list of healthcare and pharma companies working with IBM Watson Health, including Yale University, CVS Health and Medtronic.
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