IBM plans to move Watson Health to the cloud
IBM now plans to move its Watson Health cognitive services to a hybrid cloud model. Watson is IBM's supercomputer that uses artificial intelligence ( AI ) to analyze natural language and run data analytics. Watson is used to identify medical data sources and recommend treatments to physicians or match patients to clinical trials. The Veterans Administration have been using Watson for genomics as part of its oncology program, which primarily looks for possible new treatments for stage 4 cancer patients. The artificial intelligence engine is used to go through huge amounts of data to identify new uses for drugs. Watson also connects patients to clinical drug trials and offer potential treatment options based on previous outcomes of patients with similar heath profiles. The Watson Health service is offered by setting up on-site services in hospitals and other healthcare and research facilities.
John Kelly, the head of IBM Watson Health division, stated that a hybrid cloud solution is in the works because health care institutions want their data on-site but want to be able to connect to other data and run analytics on the cloud. IBM will have two separate data areas. Data will sit on-site and a separate public could where clients could put data that they want to share in the cloud. The buyout of Red Hat earlier will become integral to IBM's hybrid cloud. The purchase of Red Hat bring software to connect public and private data together.
Offering a hybrid cloud to healthcare and insurance customers of Watson Health will reduce the need for IBM onsite services, since Watson's AI engine will be exposed through different user interfaces. IBM will go to user sites and move their data to a private cloud. They will connect them to IBM's public cloud, and then move that data to a HIPAA compliant cloud for healthcare use.
An IBM spokesman said IBM's Watson Health service has 11,000 clinical measures in it's analytics suite. Some are on-site and others are on IBM's cloud, depending on the client's preference and the market segment. Traditionally, most of those services did begin on premise. The first data IBM plans to move is from insurance systems. Once payer data is moved to the hybrid cloud, the electronic medical records acquired through the Explorys acquisition will follow.
The new hybrid cloud will enable the healthcare industry to instantaneously gain access to the payer and EMR data in its public cloud and apply Watson's artificial intelligence to perform natural language processing of medical records. Hospitals and insurance companies can use patient data to determine benefit plans to offer. It can also be used to determine what the costs will be, if there are preferences for regional healthcare providers and which treatment procedures may be effective for less money.