IBM Watson Inspires Mobile EHR Link To Health Data

IBM has announced an expansion of its Analytics Solutions Centre, in Dallas, to connect US medical data to mobile electronic health records (EHRs) using natural-language processing and technology similar to that used with its Watson supercomputer.

As part of the centre’s expansion, IBM will incorporate Watson-like analytics capabilities along with clinical voice recognition from Nuance Communications to link with Hers on smartphones using voice or text.

Watson was recently featured on the “Jeopardy” game show in which it defeated its two human competitors.

Rapid Search Through Millions Of Documents

Analytics will allow physicians and researchers to pull meaning and context from human speech and answer complex questions by sifting through millions of books, encyclopaedias, periodicals, medical notes, exams and pathology reports. Physicians will be able to access data on patient conditions deep in these documents and make more informed decisions on patient treatment.

With analytics capabilities like that of Watson, health care organisations will not only be able to understand large amounts of data but will also enable better co-ordination of care and measurement of clinician performance. Workers at the analytics centre can recite data from sensors, medical instruments and patient monitoring systems into EHRs on mobile devices.

A government push toward accountable care models rather than “fee for service” has led to a greater interest in health analytics, according to IBM. The US Department of Health & Human Services is offering incentives to groups of health care providers for Medicare patients’ positive health outcomes.

Meanwhile, the analytics centre will expand its work in helping hospitals monitor patients remotely from home after they have been discharged using various mobile devices. Caregivers help patients take readings on temperature, blood pressure and pulse in real time using Bluetooth-enabled smartphones.

IBM, which celebrates its centennial this year, is making a greater investment in health analytics as the amount of data from providers is expected to reach 14,000 petabytes by 2015. The analytics centre opened in 2009 and has worked with more than 150 hospitals, health plans and other health care organisations.

More than four out of five CIOs (83 percent) see business intelligence and analytics as top priorities for their businesses, according to a recent IBM CIO Study. In addition, 87 percent of CIOs in health care are using analytics compared with 69 percent of other CIOs.

IBM announced the expansion of its Dallas analytics facility on May 26 but it opened its first Analytics Data Centre in Washington in November 2009.

In March the company announced that BJC Healthcare in St Louis and Washington University School of Medicine Centre for Biometrics will use its IBM Content Analytics software to help researchers extract unstructured medical data from 50 million documents.

Health care data is growing at 35 percent a year, according to a recent report by the Enterprise Strategy Group.