Skip to main content

IBM Watson Health Begins To Take Shape


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

Popular posts from this blog

Here Are The First Connected Home Devices For Apple’s HomeKit

Apple’s HomeKit is finally starting to roll out to actual consumers, via the first crop of HomeKit-enabled accessories from third-party manufacturers. This means you’ll soon be able to get your hands on a range of products for the connected home that work with Siri on your iOS device, and that you’ll be able to do so as soon as today, since some of the new HomeKit accessories start shipping now. The accessories in question range from sensors, to lights, to thermostats, to smart outlets, and come from a group of accessory-makers with a trusted reputation in the connected home industry. HomeKit may have taken a while to arrive, but it’s doing so in grand fashion, with a practical lineup to get your home connected to your iOS ecosystem in an essential way. Elgato Eve The  Elgato Eve  is a set of connected wireless sensors that monitor key factors like indoor air quality, temperature, humidity as well as conditions outside, like temperature, humidity and air pre...

How to Run Older Applications in Windows 10

You cannot expect all the vendors to upgrade their programs to make them compatible with Windows and neither would you want to purchase all the applications every time a new version of Windows is out. Nonetheless, the fact still remains the same that not all applications are compatible with the latest operating systems and there are times when many applications do not initialize when you upgrade your PC to a newer version of Windows. To make things easy for you, Windows 10 allows you to run the programs in compatibility mode. Running a program in compatibility mode makes the application think that it is installed on an older, compatible version of Windows, thus the software runs without any flaws. There are two ways you can run a program in compatibility mode: Program Compatibility Troubleshooter – This is a step-by-step wizard that allows you to pick a program that you prefer to use and configures it to run in compatibility mode. Compatibility Tab – This tab can...

5 Best Free Antivirus for Android Phones and Tablets

Android mobiles are trending today. World is running behind android and its versions. I am sure you also having one high end android mobile with you.  So, here in this article I’ve listed the best 5 antivirus for Android phones and tablets. 1-  AVG Antivirus App For Android When you download AVG Anti-virus and install it on your mobile or tablet then it shows screen alert. By touching the screen you can perform the scan. It is a free anti virus software, which helps you to protect your mobiles from virus, malware and spyware It provides some other features like ANTI THEFT, SMS SCANNER, TASK KILLER etc. It protects your mobile when you use internet Download AVG anti-virus from ANDROID MARKET. 2-  Look Out Mobile  Antivirus Look out anti virus for mobile is one of the best android anti virus software. It keeps your tablets and phones safe and secure You can run the app any time and scan for virus It protects your mobile when you use interne...

Three Reasons Why You Need Better Personal Cyber security

From the infamous Sony hack to the recent WannaCry virtual catastrophe that affected over 300,000 computers, the need for reliable personal cyber security has never been more apparent. Rubica's skilled team of experts want to remind every one of the importance of cyber security and the three reasons why it is becoming a more pressing issue every day. With top-notch personal cyber security, most attacks are preventable. 1. Larger Number Of Attacks Americans have heard of the most notable attacks on major corporations or government entities over the past several years. However, most people who are not in the information security field do not learn just how much the attack frequency is growing. The number of cyber attacks carried out worldwide in 2015 was quadruple a number of attacks recorded in 2013. Although the cost associated with the number of annual recorded attacks is in the $500 billion range right now, experts say that it will grow well into the trillions by ...

Many Windows 10 Features are Inspired by Linux and Here’s the Proof

Short Bytes:  Windows 10 is running on millions of devices and people are praising it for its new features. But, many of the popular features seem inspired by Linux. Take a look and decide on your own. W indows has brought  many features  like Virtual Desktops, PowerShell, Flat Icons and a lot more in its latest edition Windows 10. Microsoft has worked hard to create its best Windows yet and to do that, it has taken some inspiration from its biggest competition Linux. Want to know which are features that were already present in Linux? Take a look below: Windows 10 Multiple Virtual Desktops | Linux Workspaces With Windows 10, Microsoft has brought the power of  multiple virtual desktop s  to the Windows users. With this feature, Windows users can now run different applications in multiple desktops. These multiple virtual desktops are called workspaces in Linux. If you remember, KDE 1.0 launched in 1998 was one of the earliest smooth-wo...