by Angela Guess

According to a recent press release, “Cleveland Clinic and IBM today announced a five-year agreement to expand the Clinic’s health information technology capabilities.  The Clinic and IBM aim to establish a model for a health system transition to value-based care and population health, and to uncover potential standards that could be replicated by providers nationwide. The agreement builds on a decades-long relationship between the two organizations, and reflects the parties’ intention to expand the use of IBMs secured cloud, social, mobile and Watson cognitive computing technologies across clinical and administrative operations.  The collaboration is also being designed to better capture the value of data and to enhance patient care across the systems’ nine regional hospitals and 18 full-service family health centers.”

The release goes on, “As the healthcare industry grows increasingly dependent on technology to deliver efficient, high-quality, and affordable care, the new technology implementation is designed to enable efficient analysis of data from electronic health records (EHR), information from administrative claims, and social determinants of health, allowing for both personalized clinical care and broader population-focused management. For example, data analysis could help predict which diabetes patients are resistant to certain treatments and whether similarities exist within a group of diabetes patients that could help medical providers better tailor patient engagement to address specific needs, such as notifying of recommended treatments or actions to take.”

Read more at IBM.

Photo credit: IBM