Skip to main content

IBM Watson Health Begins To Take Shape

Image
By

IBM doesn’t build new units lightly, but last April it launched IBM Watson Health. Since that time the company has been busy buying companies including Merge Healthcare, forging partnerships with the likes of Apple, CVS and Johnson and Johnson, hiring a new General Manager and purchasing the unit’s new headquarters in Cambridge, MA.
That’s quite a bit of action in five months, but Steve Gold, CMO for Watson at IBM says the hope is to build a community around attacking the big problems in healthcare in the U.S. and around the world.
“It’s about how do we build a community among the various stakeholders in which all of them stand to gain by coming together and sharing information,” he said.
In that sense, it hopes to work the way the open source community approaches a problem. You build a community of like-minded people to work on a common goal, and as solutions develop, businesses grow around these projects and people make money. The underlying project is community driven, but that in itself drives new business models.
That has led to a series of moves designed to encourage that community to come together and that includes choosing Boston to be its headquarters. It’s not a coincidence IBM chose the Boston area. It has a strong life sciences focus along with world-class hospitals and colleges (including MIT and Harvard).

New Digs, New Friends

The new headquarters in Cambridge (just across the river from Boston) is large enough to scale as the unit grows. Gold wouldn’t give an exact number, but The Boston Business Journal reported that the company would be hiring hundreds of clinicians and researchers to work at the facility.
IBM has been enhancing its partner network and announced several new partners today including Boston Children’s Hospital. The deal with BCH involves using Watson technology to drive the OPENPediatrics initiative, a program designed to help share pediatric medical information with hospitals and medical professionals around the world.
The company is also working with The Columbia University Medical Center, where they are using Watson technology “to help oncologists in the Columbia Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center translate DNA insights into personalized treatment options for patients,” according to the announcement. IBM reports that this is the 16th medical institution working with Watson on Cancer research.

Apple Partnership

At the time of the announcement in April, IBM also announced partnerships with Apple, Johnson and Johnson and Medtronics. In fact, the Apple partnership is already beginning to come together with projects based on Apple’s HealthKit and ResearchKit.
As part of today’s broad announcement, IBM indicated that it would be working with Sage Bionetworks’ Open Biomedical Research Platform around the first Apple projects. Sage will be collecting information from Apple Devices using ResearchKit developer tools, initially with breast cancer and Parkinson’s patients. It will be aggregating storing, curating and analyzing the information coming in from the Apple Devices. IBM will be providing the underlying technology with its IBM Watson Health Cloud platform.
The Apple partnership is a great idea that took on a life of its own, Gold said. “When we approached them, they were thrilled we could help facilitate data from wearables, nutrition and other areas.”
In addition to all of this, the company announced the IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Science Compliance. It’s not a name that exactly rolls off the tongue, but it is designed to provide the tools and technologies for companies to build a fully compliant research cloud.  The solution is built on top of IBM Softlayer, its Infrastructure as a Service offering, and offers what the company claims is a fully compliant cloud solution for the heavily regulated life sciences industry.
IBM is throwing a lot of resources at Watson Health and it hopes to use its technology to drive change across the healthcare industry. The Watson Health headquarters will be the center of that, Gold said.
“It’s so much broader than healthcare It’s, about education, prevention and wellness. All of these touchpoint are correlated,” he said.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SoftBank Lands $236M From Alibaba And Foxconn To Bring Its Pepper Robot To The World

By
Remember Pepper,  the intelligent robot that SoftBank unveiled last year ? Pepper goes on sale in Japan this coming weekend, but in advance of that launch  SoftBank has revealed  that Alibaba and manufacturer Foxconn have invested $118 million each in its robotics division. That deal will give Alibaba and Foxconn 20 percent shares in SoftBank Robotics Holdings (known as SBRH), with SoftBank retaining a dominant 60 percent stake. “SoftBank, Alibaba and Foxconn will build a structure to bring Pepper and other robotics businesses to global markets, and cooperate with the aim of spreading and developing the robotics industry on a worldwide scale,” SoftBank said in its announcement. SoftBank isn’t short on money, of course — it is building up quite a portfolio of e-commerce investments across Asia — but its two partners bring know-how, strategy and global networks to the table. So, it looks like Pepper has eventual world domination plans. Or, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Apple to release new small phone before iPhone 7

By
Apple to release new small phone before iPhone 7 Apple is to create a smaller, cheap version of the iPhone, persistent to the 4 inch size of the iPhone 5. Apple is testing 5 different iPhone 7 models. It will sell next to Apple’s existing phones however mark the first time that Apple has ready a latest phone smaller than the one it locate on sale before. There will be the choice of 2 or three colours likely the  gold, space grey  and silver options that mainly Apple products now coming up. Other than inside there will be very much better components. The flagship improve will be the addition of the A9 chip that powers the iPhone 6S. There may also be a number of changes to the outside. The most able to be seen is apt to be the addition of the somewhat curved edges that are found on the iPhone 6 and 6S. careinfo.in Apple  dropped the iPhone 5C previous this year. A number of hoped that it would be replaced by a 6C, though reports at the time made clear that we...
Post a Comment
Read more

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

By
At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...
1 comment
Read more

Trump cites Facebook exec’s comments downplaying Russian ad influence on election

By
You’d be forgiven for missing Donald Trump’s multiple retweets of Facebook executive Rob Goldman over the weekend. Perhaps you were spending time with family, watching Black Panther or just attempting to forget politics for a moment by ignoring the manic flurry of social media updates from the leader of the free world. But in amongst a deluge of tweets that blamed Democrats for failing to preserve DACA, called out the FBI over the recent school shooting in Florida on the FBI and affectionately referred to a member of congress as “Liddle’ Adam Schiff, the leakin’ monster of no control,” the President cited Facebook’s VP of Ads as evidence against claims that his campaign colluded with Russia. “The Fake News Media never fails,” Trump tweeted over the weekend. “Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!” Trump was citing Goldman’s own Twitter dump over the past week, responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictment of 13 Russian...
Post a Comment
Read more