The Watson Health Cloud will be an open source but secure platform on which care providers and researchers can share and analyze health data for greater insights into trends to improve individual and overall patient outcomes.

IBM, which made the announcement at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Chicago, also said it has acquired big data healthcare analytics providers Phytel and Explorys, whose software will be used in concert with Watson Health.

The Explorys platform enables healthcare systems to collect, link and combine data from hundreds of disparate sources across their enterprise and clinically integrated networks. This data will be derived from clinical, claims, billing, accounting, devices, community and patient information.

Phytel develops and sells cloud-based services that help healthcare providers coordinate care in order to meet new healthcare quality requirements and reimbursement models.

“Their data sets represent 90 million lives, primarily in this country,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of IBM’s Watson Business Group.

Additionally, IBM announced three new partnerships with Apple, Johnson & Johnson, and Medtronic to optimize consumer and medical devices.

BM will apply Watson Health cloud services and analytics to Apple’s HealthKit and ResearchKit, two features announced with last month’s release of Apple Watch. HealthKit enables the collection of data from the Apple Watch, and ResearchKit enables Apple Watch wearers to take part in massive health data studies by sharing the baseline vital signs and activity data.

Apple engineers have been working with dozens of research institutes, such as the Mayo Clinic, in developing apps that will help in research on Parkinson’s Disease, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, asthma and breast cancer.

IBM will provide a secure research capability on the Watson Health Cloud platform, de-identifying personal data to allow researchers to easily store, aggregate and model information collected from iOS users who opt-in to contribute personal data to medical research.

Johnson & Johnson will collaborate with IBM to create intelligent health coaching systems centered on preoperative and postoperative patient care, including joint replacement and spinal surgery.

“There’s so much we have to learn with this sea of data,” said Len Greer, president of Health and Wellness Solutions at Johnson & Johnson. “We’re going to start this collaboration [with IBM’s Watson Health] with joint replacement surgery… joints, knees and hips.”

Johnson & Johnson recently launched Patient Athlete, a pre and post operative video health coaching program, but Watson’s analytics and “cognitive” capability will enable the program to grow into a virtual patient coach, working with patient data to tailor a post-operative recovery coaching program.

Johnson & Johnson also plans to launch new health apps targeting chronic conditions, such as diabetes and obesity, which take up as much as 80% of $7 trillion global healthcare spending, according to Greer.

Medtronic will leverage the Watson Health Cloud insights platform to collaborate with IBM around delivery of new highly personalized care management services for people with diabetes. The system will receive and analyze patient information and data from various devices including insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors, and use this information to provide dynamic, personalized diabetes management strategies to patients and their providers.

Rhoden said Watson Health will include the open source sharing of code, so that any company can become a partner and develop applications for the platform.

“They’ll be solutions we bring to market, solutions we work with others to bring to market, and startups can even take advantage of the analytics to build future solutions,” Rhoden said.

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The new offering enables healthcare organizations to leverage the affordability and convenience of AWS’ highly secure framework to safeguard patient health information.

The ClearDATA Healthcare Managed Cloud can now provide one of the most flexible and comprehensive cloud data management environments available for “Big Health Data” analytics. The announcement coincides with the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition to be held April 12-16 in Chicago, IL.

“We are excited to combine our healthcare-exclusive approach to information security, compliance and managed services with the scale and diversity of AWS,” stated Matt Ferrari, Chief Technology Officer, ClearDATA. “This combination makes it easier for healthcare organizations to securely move their data to the cloud using a service that fuses ClearDATA’s deep knowledge of healthcare requirements with AWS’ cloud infrastructure in a variety of important healthcare use cases.”

“The digital revolution is in full swing with healthcare organizations adopting cloud computing to create tangible impacts on patient lives, saving time, simplifying processes, enabling faster access to data, and enabling global collaboration in completely new ways,” said Steve Halliwell, GM, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are pleased ClearDATA is introducing its new Healthcare Managed Cloud offering on AWS to aid healthcare organizations eager to harness the cost and agility benefits of cloud computing without compromising on data security.”

Meaningful Use, Advanced Imaging and EHRs are driving massive growth in data volume, which brings new challenges and opportunities for healthcare analytics applications to generate meaningful insights. Many organizations are finding it difficult to house these analytics solutions within a traditional IT infrastructure, which requires considerable capital outlay in servers and other equipment, plus continuous security and performance monitoring.

With the ClearDATA Healthcare Managed Cloud, organizations can cost-effectively store, manage and securely share their data from a single location. This offers unprecedented benefits for solving Big Health Data challenges:

• Protected health information resides in a HIPAA-compliant, HITRUST-certified environment on the AWS Cloud
• New capability to store and analyze large datasets to glean meaningful insights into patient care, population health and healthcare administration
• Centralize, normalize and analyze data within the same location it is managed and stored

ClearDATA will leverage the advanced features of AWS’ infrastructure, including multi-Region failovers, log analysis, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions and a dedicated DevOps practice. ClearDATA has committed a dedicated engineering team to focus on adapting the latest and greatest cloud technologies for the healthcare market.

ClearDATA will exhibit at the HIMSS15 show at booth #5334. Company representatives will be available to demo Object Storage and Archival for secure long-term storage of critical data. Visitors may qualify for a free 90-day proof of concept to evaluate whether the ClearDATA Healthcare Managed Cloud built on AWS can help remove the barriers to affordable and efficient healthcare IT management.

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Lafayette boasts a high-speed fiber optic network, LUS Fiber, which gives it an edge over many other small cities. The network’s bandwidth and reliability allow businesses to deliver healthcare in new and better ways, the presenters said.

Combined with the cloud-based data center services, broadband also is changing up the data center market, as more companies shift to a utility model for data center needs. Whether data center technology providers are nimble enough to adapt to these changes remains to be seen, but first, here’s a few highlights of what some of the presenters had to say:

• Doug Menefee, CIO of Schumacher Group, an emergency and hospital services management company based in Lafayette, said high-speed fiber connectivity has allowed the company to reliably use Amazon’s cloud-based data center services to store much of its data, and also provide high-speed connectivity to 300 different partner sites.

One fiber connection running at 1 gigabytes per second (Gbps) connects to Amazon’s infrastructure, while another 1 Gbps pipe is reserved for communication with partner sites. The company still runs a couple of data centers, he said, but is transitioning these to the cloud, allowing its IT people to “spend less time in the data center environment.”

• Joey Branton, director of technology for Acadian Ambulance Service, a Lafayette-based ambulance service with 4,000 employees, is committed to running its own data centers. Branton said that it uses high-speed fiber connectivity to ensure a high level of redundancy between its data centers, which includes one facility in Chicago and one in Louisiana. Branton described ambulance dispatch and its other systems as “heartbeat operations” that need absolute reliability, using fast connectivity to mirror systems and data so that when the rare but inevitable failures do occur, a system can “fail successfully.”

• Allen Aubert, a registered nurse and neuroscience educator with Our Lady of Lourdes Regional Medical Center in Lafayette, demoed the technology used for its “Telestroke” program. Telestroke allows rural hospitals in the region who have stroke victim coming into their emergency rooms virtually consult with a neurologist. The partner hospitals each have a robot equipped with high-definition cameras and a display screen to give the Lafayette-based neurologist on call a “remote presence” at the emergency room. The neurologist can see and talk with the patient, interact with the emergency room doctor and staff, and can maneuver the robot for a better view.

The real-world examples from the health care industry point to how companies are approaching technology today. Instead of thinking of technology as something you install in a data center to run backend systems, the focus is on how technology assets can enable entirely new processes or improve existing ones.

The pessimistic view for someone involved in data center solutions is that this shift diminishes the market, since it becomes less essential for companies to run data centers. Yes, in one sense, cloud-based data center services as well as co-location data centers have changed up the market, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

For one thing, the big providers also need data center infrastructure, though at a different scale and level of sophistication compared with the demand they’ve absorbed. It’s also important to remember some companies will need solutions for private clouds. And even those companies who are eliminating their data centers still need reliability “around the edges” of the cloud. So protecting and managing assets like network closets and switch gear is a vital aspect of this new market.

At the same time, there will always be companies that deem it necessary to maintain their own data centers, but will leverage better bandwidth and cloud technology to provide higher reliability. These companies will need help with products that help them better manage energy for larger sites, while ensuring the highest levels of redundancy, such as uninterruptable power supply solutions that support N+1 redundancy (see white paper # 75 for more information).

The healthcare industry also is a good example of a sector in which power protection and energy management solutions increasingly are needed outside the data center environment. The “Internet of Things” already is happening in healthcare with so much of the equipment being smart, networked, and mission critical. Yes, healthcare companies might not run as many data centers as they used to, but they have many types of critical assets that need power protection and energy management. That might be the biggest long term opportunity out there in the disruption wrought by the cloud.

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