New IBM Software Helps Analyze the World's Data for Healthcare Transformation

Seton Healthcare Family Adopts Complementary Watson Solution To Improve Patient Care and Help Reduce Costs

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Oct 25, 2011, 09:00 ET

LAS VEGAS, Oct. 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced new software for the healthcare industry to help health care providers and payers improve patient care and reduce costs. The new software offering uses content analytics similar to what is found in IBM's Watson technology.

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Seton Healthcare Family is the first client to adopt and use the technology, called IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare. The solution will allow healthcare organizations to extract relevant clinical information from vast amounts of patient data to better analyze the past, understand the present, and predict future outcomes.

By combining IBM's Watson technology with industry solutions offerings, Seton intends to focus the new content and predictive analytics solution on the root causes of hospital readmissions, and ways it can decrease preventable multiple hospital visits.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, one in five patients suffer from preventable readmissions, which represents $17.4 billion of the current $102.6 billion Medicare budget.* Beginning in 2012, hospitals will be penalized for high readmission rates with reductions in Medicare discharge payments.**

"IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare uses the same type of natural language processing as IBM Watson, enabling us to leverage our unstructured information in new ways not possible before," said Charles J. Barnett, FACHE, President/Chief Executive Officer, Seton Healthcare Family. "With this solution, we can access an integrated view of relevant clinical and operational information to drive more informed decision making. For example, by predicting readmission candidates, we can reduce costly and preventable readmissions, decrease mortality rates, and ultimately improve the quality of life for our patients."

Most healthcare organizations are drowning in data but are challenged to gain reliable, actionable insights from this information. In fact, more than 80 percent of an institution's data today is unstructured. In healthcare, this is in the form of physician notes, registration forms, discharge summaries, documents and more, and is doubling every five years. Different from machine- ready data, this content lacks structure and is arduous for healthcare enterprises to include in business analysis and therefore is routinely left out. As a result, millions of patient notes and records often sit unavailable in separate clinical data silos. This content contains valuable information, but there's historically been no easy way to analyze it.

IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare enables doctors and healthcare professionals to go far beyond traditional search and analysis of unstructured data. They can advance diagnosis and treatment by accurately extracting medical facts and understanding relationships buried in large volumes of clinical and operational data. The IBM solution transforms raw information into healthcare insight quickly by revealing trends, patterns, deviations and predicting the probability of outcomes, allowing organizations to derive insight in minutes versus weeks or months, or not at all. As a result, healthcare professionals can find more effective ways to care for high-risk patients, provide safer patient care, and develop new models for reimbursement for quality care.

The new IBM solution gives clinical and other knowledge workers and executives several ways to interact with analyzed information including searching, exploring, mining, monitoring and reporting. It delivers a set of proven technologies that meet the rigorous standards and requirements of the healthcare community. The software is also compatible with IBM's Health Integration Framework, which means healthcare organizations can realize more value from existing information system investments such as data warehouse, business intelligence, master data management and advanced case management.

IBM is offering new content and predictive solution services through its Business Analytics and Optimization initiative, which includes a new center of competence for UIMA-based text analysis solutions. This center of competence draws on resources from IBM Global Services, IBM Software Lab Services, and the IBM jStart emerging technology team.

IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare is optimized to run on IBM Power Systems, which are designed for high throughput and complex analysis of structured and unstructured data. Built on the foundation of IBM POWER7 processor technology, Power Systems are available at many different price points and can be tailor fit for purpose and rapidly deployed for a broad range of customer environments with leadership performance, ease of management and efficiency.

For more information on IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/ecm/content-analytics/predictive/healthcare.html

For more information on IBM Watson, visit www.ibmwatson.com.

Follow IBM and Analytics & Information on Twitter #baforum.

IBM YouTube Analytics Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ibmbusinessanalytics.

* New England Journal of Medicine – Rehospitalization Among Patients in the Medicare Fee-for-Service Program, April 2009

** http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/COM-263665/3-Readmissions-to-Reduce-Now

Media Contacts:
Steve Milmore
IBM Media Relations
978-399-7347
[email protected]

SOURCE IBM