Your health information may be collected by Apple watches and eventually Watson of IBM cloud computing platform, where medical researchers and doctors can use it in the course of work.
When developing a treatment plan for a patient, doctors must factor in clinical trials information, medical journal articles and, increasingly, data gathered from wearables and medical devices, said Steve Gold, vice president of the Watson Group. The Watson Health Cloud aims to combine these data streams and help physicians make better-informed care decisions, he said.
“Health care data is very unstructured. There’s exponentially more data available in text,” said Gold.
The business unit will work with Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic on using Watson Health Cloud to analyze data provided by patients.
For clinicians who build apps with ResearchKit, Apple’s recently announced framework for creating mobile apps for medical research, IBM will provide a cloud computing platform to store and analyze this data. The information will be de-identified and people must opt-in to contribute their data, IBM said.
To beef up Watson’s analytics capabilities, IBM acquired two companies that use big data to develop individualized care plans. One them, Explorys, has a cloud platform that incorporates clinical and financial information from various hospitals and individual care providers to identify treatment patterns and outcomes. The other, Phytel, sells cloud services to help care providers better collaborate and coordinate patient care.
