Truven Health Analytics, the latest in a series of healthcare and life sciences industry acquisitions at IBM brings in an incredible amount of data—operational and financial data from over 750 hospitals, 30 million individuals’ data from health information exchanges and 215 million de-identified patient records. Importantly, it also adds multi-skilled analytics talent that can help drive results from it.
IBM launched IBM Watson Health about a year ago to focus resources on addressing value-based care. The initiative brought together some of IBM’s own talent and technology with several acquisitions: Phytel (population health management), Explorys (financial, operational and medical database and system), and Merge Healthcare (medical image management). Now, with Truven Health Analytics, IBM expands its network and capability for not just having, but using the data that can help impact health, medical, and administrative outcomes.
With broad and diverse datasets across patient, provider and payer systems, IBM and its clients have potential to drive insight, change and impact, but it’s only relevant when it can be easily accessed and used. The latest acquisition, Truven Health Analytics, includes research scientists who have specializations across healthcare, life sciences, and technology, including provider quality and efficiency measurement, outcomes management, behavioral health, and software and database design. This kind of talent that can help turn data into insight, and relevant action, is critical for the “last mile” – achieving results.
With all the resources coming together in IBM Watson Health, we see simplification as a critical success factor—providing entry points for clients, for example, such as the IBM Watson Care Manager. It is designed to help achieve better quality health and care at reduced cost by decreasing re-admissions and increasing care plan adherence through care coordination using Phytel’s patient engagement tools, Apple HealthKit and ResearchKit. This approach articulates the industry and business problems to solve, outcomes to achieve, and starting points for solution sets. It’s a “plug-and-play” solution. There are customers that have licensed the Watson Health database and with their own expertise, tapped into the data store to address their own issues, as we explored in IBM Watson: A Sherlock to Today’s Medical Research. For those companies, however, which don’t have the expertise on board, or want to supplement it, the addition of Truven expertise can be a valuable resource.
The way IBM Watson Health is coming together with its collection of data sources, tools, technologies and resources, it looks a bit like a high-end supermarket. These markets have many elements we need for our meals and households, “curate” the content to preferred tastes of their target market, include delis with ready-made meals to suit personal preferences or even food allergies, and often make clerks or even chefs available to help find items customers need to put together meals for the week. Customers of the supermarket or clients of IBM can work with them to define what it is that is needed, start from scratch to build it with the data and resources, or tap into starting point solution or ready made “meal.” It’s not enough to have the components in the store, they need to be made relevant to the user. By bringing together the patient record, cost, claims, and outcomes data, and tools for accessing and analyzing it, as well as the group of experts including data scientists who are also clinicians, IBM is offering a high-end supermarket approach to addressing value-based healthcare, with the potential for making it more accessible.
Service Provider : IBM