IBM has been experiencing quite a few challenges in its core IT business with the shift in market trends and is now moving to reposition itself as a cloud platform and cognitive solutions company with IBM Watson.
The company launched the Watson Health unit last April and forayed into the growing, dynamic health information technology market. IBM has since invested more than $4 billion into Watson Health by acquiring four Healthcare IT companies so far including Phytel, a population health management company; Explorys, a healthcare data analytics company; the $1 billion acquisition of Merge Healthcare, an imaging platform company; and the $2.6 billion acquisition of Truven, a health data analytics company.
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With the Phytel and Explorys acquisitions, IBM claims it now has 100 million patient records. With the Merge Healthcare acquisition IBM secured $30 billion images and with Truven, it acquired 200 million patient claims records. With these acquisitions, IBM claims it is now the largest non-government repository of healthcare data with 600 petabytes of information covering 300 million patients.
Its strategy seems to be multi-fold. IBM becomes one of the largest health data companies in the world. Using Watson, it will add an analytics layer to read, decipher and interpret all the data and images. Machine learning is the second layer where Watson provides cognitive insights into the data on top of the health cloud.
According to the company, it wants to focus on five key areas; the first is to help life science companies get to drug discovery and reimbursement faster. Other areas include clinical decision support in oncology and genomics, image analysis by combining data with electronic health records to arrive at quicker diagnoses, solutions for chronic diseases, and payments and values.
This is a very ambitious plan with the goal of putting IBM at the forefront of creating a new market. IBM’s goal is not just to collect data; with its platform, it can analyze, predict and speed treatment recommendations through Watson, which will also house much of the important medical literature from all over the world.
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There are a lot of companies in the business of health data analytics, imaging and patient records, but we have not seen many companies with the integrated set of solutions and technology that IBM is bringing into the Healthcare IT space.
Watson’s cognitive solutions will be the biggest differentiator for IBM’s healthcare business; it is not just about who can amass the largest datasets, but who can become the platform of choice for companies to develop applications on top of it.
When it comes to IBM’s oncology offering the company isn’t the only player in the game. NantHeath has been working on a somewhat similar solution. NantHeath also has been on an acquisition spree to expand its offerings covering genomic science, healthcare IT and a cloud-based platform to provide actionable health information. Flatiron also is another important player in oncology software and personalized medicine.
This may be what the future looks like in the evolution of the Healthcare IT sector: integrated solutions that bring the fragmented pieces of Healthcare IT together and turn all of the data into actionable insights almost instantly.
That means more mergers and acquisitions for companies looking to acquire data and patient records, and introduce machine learning to provide intelligence at a level that does not exist today.
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Raj Prabhu is CEO and Co-founder of Mercom Capital Group, a research and communications firm focused on healthcare IT and cleantech markets. Mercom publishes weekly market intelligence and quarterly funding and M&A reports on the Healthcare IT/Digital Health sector. The company also provides custom research and communication programs along with funding and M&A strategies.
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