Intellectual Property and Licensing

Making sense of medical data

Healthcare today is awash in data: diagnostic images, electronic medical records, doctors' notes, even streaming data from patient monitors. Much of that information is worthless unless it can be captured, organized and analyzed for useful facts, diagnoses and trends. That's where IBM intellectual property can help.

Working with IBM IP, healthcare institutions can improve their access to and management of medical images. With IBM's approach, medical professionals can also scan multiple data sources for the data needed for advanced analytics and gain better insight into critical issues and patterns in the data. The result is faster, improved patient care.

Monitoring critical patients is much improved thanks to and IBM technology that analyzes streaming patient data (such as blood pressure and pulse) and helps detect life-threatening events by analyzing more than 1,000 pieces of information per second.

Physicians face staggering volumes of printed information, and applying insights from hundreds of thousands of articles to patient care is a considerable challenge. Enter Watson, the computer system that defeated human champions on the American television quiz show Jeopardy!. Watson can sift through an equivalent of about 1 million books or roughly 200 million pages of data, analyze it and offer precise responses in less than three seconds.

WellPoint, the largest health benefits company in the United States in terms of medical membership, will use Watson's capability to help physicians identify the most likely diagnosis and treatment options in complex cases.