Cleveland Clinic www.clevelandclinic.org and IBM http://ibm.com have announced a five year agreement to expand the Cleveland Clinic’s health IT capabilities to enhance patient care across the systems nine regional hospitals and 18 full service family health centers.
Implementing the new technology will enable the efficient analysis of data from EHRs, information from administrative claims, and social determinants of health that will enable personalized clinical care and broader population focused management.
The adoption of EHRs across the U.S has created an imperative for hospitals and health systems to apply advanced technologies like IBM’s Watson’s http://ibm.com/watsonhealth ability to do cognitive computing.
IBM’s Watson Health system is able to deliver information through the cloud, able to analyze high volumes of data, understands complex questions posed in natural language, and proposes evidence-based answers.
In 2015, IBM Watson Health and the Watson Health Cloud platform were launched. This new unit works with doctors, researchers, and insurers to help them innovate by surfacing insights from the massive amount of personal health data being created and shared daily.
The collaboration with IBM will allow Cleveland Clinic physicians to present clinical and administrative challenges to Watson and have the ability to mine mass amounts of data combined with knowledge obtained from medical literature, and then use the data to train and focus Watson’s capabilities to support clinical care and administrative tasks.
According to Toby Cosgrove, MD., CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic, “This initiative with IBM is mutually beneficial and will significantly advance our IT capabilities. With the explosion of data in healthcare, the technology solutions we develop and implement together could transform our ability to deliver quality, evidence-based care and be able to respond more effectively to the needs of our patients, caregivers, and partners.”
“IBM believes the technology and innovation partnership with the Cleveland Clinic will result in transformational information technology strategies enabling both the Cleveland Clinic and IBM to respond to disruptive changes occurring throughout the healthcare industry,” said Philip Guido, General Manager, for North America IBM Services.