IBM to commit $100M, hire clinicians in health IT innovation plan

July 19, 2010 — 11:28am ET | By Neil Versel

IBM is committing $100 million and many of its own scientists and technologists over the next three years to develop innovations that help healthcare professionals and insurance companies deliver evidence-based, high-quality care at a lower cost.

Via the IBM Research division, the Smarter Healthcare program will draw from IBM's nine research labs worldwide. The company plans to hire approximately 100 physicians, nurses, engineers, economists and social scientists, as well as collaborate with various companies, universities and government agencies. IBM hopes to generate evidence that leads to more personalized treatment protocols, simplify care delivery and develop new incentives and payment models that encourage quality rather than quantity of care.

"If these areas are addressed in a substantive way by bringing together a lot of the work that we have been doing over the years into greater coherence and focus, we will be able to help the payers, providers and other pharmaceutical companies and other parts of the healthcare system to do their job much more effectively while lowering costs and improving clinical outcomes," Chalapathy Neti, IBM Research's global director of healthcare transformation, says in an interview with InformationWeek.

"In fact, the proliferation of diagnostics technology has in many ways added another layer of complexity, making it more difficult to gain valuable insights for patient care. Enabling greater coordination between care providers and transforming data into clinical decision intelligence could improve patient outcomes and help lower costs of healthcare today," he adds in an IBM press release.

Neti says IBM is looking to incorporate cloud computing into many of its plans. "One key area where we believe cloud will be valuable is for large scale comparative effectiveness infrastructures to allow for massive scale aggregation of data and creating a data model that will allow us to analyze the data to get these comparable effectiveness insights. But we are looking at lots of other areas where cloud will be very valuable," Neti tells InformationWeek.

To learn more about this initiative:
- take a look at this CNET item
- read this InformationWeek story
- view the IBM press release
- visit the Smarter Healthcare website