John Hearne, Head of IBM Cúram Solutions, IBM Software Group

By John Hearne

I recently read a story about an elderly woman with a heart condition. She lives in a building without air conditioning and there was concern that a hot and humid day in July could easily put her health at risk and possibly lead to a costly ER visit.

As the story pointed out, the reality is that a few hundred dollars for an air conditioner could solve the problem before it ever happened.

Of course, to case workers at social services agencies around the world, the difficulty of identifying interventions before situations become critical is not news.

In a perfect system, an individual’s health needs would be understood not only medically, but also in the context of their lifestyle, living environment, family conditions and other social factors. Making this information readily available to health and case workers would help them spend more time in the field where they are needed the most.

IBM, through its Smarter Care initiative, enables care providers – from healthcare and life sciences organizations to social service agencies and pharmacies – to integrate into a single view the potential impacts of social determinants, lifestyle choices and clinical factors on a person’s well-being. They can then uncover insights using predictive, content and cognitive analytics. The end result: reduced hospital re-admissions, improved wellness for the individual and lower costs.

According to the Institute for Alternative Futures, social and environmental factors may contribute as much as 40 percent of the variance in health between populations. This means one group may be at a greater risk for heart problems or asthma due to climate conditions, for example.

As hundreds of social programs directors, city welfare leaders and mayors gather in Dublin next week at the European Social Services Conference, IBM will lead a dialogue around the importance of social investment. It will also discuss ways to bring about change in the way services are designed, delivered and evaluated.

At the forefront will be a discussion about RightServicing, an approach that focuses on how to best manage stressed resources and effectively deliver services to those citizens who need it most, when they need it.

Creating an environment around Smarter Care is about identifying an individual’s strengths and needs across all dimensions of care – clinical, social and behavioral.

With this knowledge, health and case workers can bring a wider range of services to address health risks, both medical and otherwise; including access to proper housing and education, supplementary income, proper nutrition and access to transportation.

Technorati Tags: Smarter Cities

David Turek, Vice President, IBM Exascale Computing

By David Turek 

A major challenge in cardiology is to predict who will die suddenly from ventricular arrhythmias – the most common cause of sudden cardiac death, which itself is the largest cause of natural death in the U.S.

Despite years of intense medical research, likely victims are hard to predict and even if identified, there are not effective and low-cost therapies available.

Mathematical models have the potential to provide insight into the mechanics of arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death, but we’ve never had the computational power necessary to make a model run even close to the speed of a real beating heart. Instead, researchers have been forced to work at low resolution, settle for short run times of – at most – a few beats, or take hours for a single heart beat.

Enter Sequoia, an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer built on the IBM POWER Architecture at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The 16+ petaflop system, #2 on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers announced today is currently being used to run a code called Cardioid, which was created by IBM and LLNL researchers to realistically model a beating human heart at high resolution.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For the first time, fully detailed whole heart models can be run quickly enough to examine how potentially fatal arrhythmias develop and are influenced by individual genetic variations, the administration of drugs and the use of medical devices. The IBM, LLNL team envisions this capability could eventually be widely adopted by medical centers, pharmaceutical companies and medical device firms, helping them to study and better understand the mechanisms that can lead to heart ailments.

For example, an initial modeling study investigated a class of drugs designed to prevent arrhythmia, but later produced greater mortality in some patient populations. Drugs targeting many diseases have the unfortunate side effect of increasing arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death. Understanding the risk of arrhythmias remains a challenge for the both pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory agencies because the danger may only be revealed after a drug is administered across a large and diverse patient population.

The Cardioid simulation work has been named as a finalist in the 2012 Gordon Bell Prize competition, which annually recognizes the most important advances in HPC applications and will announce this year’s winner on Thursday.

Other notable IBM systems on the TOP500 listinclude the fastest supercomputer inEurope, the POWER Architecture-based Blue Gene/Q system “JUQUEEN” at the German research center Forschungszentrum Juelich, which will be made available to scientists via a peer review process for projects ranging from biophysics to plasma physics.

The fastest system inCanadais also a Blue Gene/Q. It will be applied toward, among other things, such projects as brain research, assessing how climate change impacts watershed and better predicting consumers’ energy needs. It will be used to help make significant contributions to scientific breakthroughs and also help small and medium-sized enterprises in Ontario speed product research and development.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Yellowstone supercomputer, debuting on the TOP500 at #13, last month began supporting initial scientific projects on a wide range of Earth science topics that will improve predictions of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, fires and other natural hazards.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For all of these organizations, it’s important that research is completed with energy efficient, highly-utilized systems to lower costs, especially those that use public funding. Beyond the immediate economic challenges of unused assets and higher energy bills, also at stake is the long term ability of clients to innovate and grow. Of more than 300 global businesses surveyed by IBM and IDC, only 21 percent were operating highly efficient data centers, but those companies are able to spend 50 percent more on business innovation and growth.

Sequoia is 91 percent water cooled and 9 percent air cooled. This allows the system to achieve more performance, while simultaneously consuming less electricity. IBM Blue Gene/Q systems account for 25 of the 30 most energy efficient systems on the TOP500 list. Today, one of the fastest computers in the world is also one of the most energy efficient.

Technorati Tags: Blue Gene/Q, Gordon Bell, human heart modeling, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Power Architecture, Sequoia, Smarter Planet, Top500

If you or a loved one were diagnosed with cancer, would you prefer to only have local physicians working on treatment? Or would you rather have physicians who are working with the best minds in America to develop a personalized treatment plan?

Not everyone can receive care at Johns Hopkins or the Cleveland Clinic, and they shouldn’t have to.

Taking advantage of what technology can do is central to this type of information sharing. But today, healthcare providers use technology to solve challenges they see individually, at a price they can afford. Not surprisingly, the result is often dissatisfaction, primarily for two reasons.

First, today’s health information technology systems operate as a collection of incompatible components stitched together until it resembles Frankenstein’s monster.

And second, contrary to media reports and the predictions of pundits, electronic health records are not a magic bullet. Though critical to many elements of success in healthcare, EHRs are only one of dozens of needed IT assets. How useful would email be if you could only send messages within your company? So how can we be satisfied with EHRs that can’t track across all settings of care or facilitate intra-team communications –functions central to accountable, patient-centric care.

Woodrow Wilson once said “I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.” This collaborative approach is what we need in healthcare – a way to share information that allows providers to connect with each other, both at a local system level and nationwide.

Premier, a hospital-owned alliance with nearly 87,000 member care sites, and IBM recently announced the creation of the world’s largest virtual healthcare community.

This technology platform – called PremierConnect  – was developed with the partnership and consultation of not only Premier and IBM but also more than 100 of the nation’s leading health systems. It allows providers nationwide to interact as one in communities of common interest, sharing learnings, data and strategies based on thousands of patient outcomes that can be used to benefit treatment anywhere.

It also supports new ways to deliver care that are required by health reform, including accountable care, which emphasizes more clinical integration and healthier outcomes.

At the local level, care will be connected across all sites – hospitals, physician offices, outpatient clinics – and these providers will know which patients are driving undesirable outcomes, which physicians have the highest costs or the poorest performance, and why these scenarios are occurring.

For patients, this means confidence that their providers understand everything about their care – what drugs they’re taking or allergic to, what procedures they’ve had recently and more. No more unnecessary care that can compromise safety and add to already expensive bills for both consumers and health systems.

These population analytic capabilities also provide insight into how to manage populations for improved outcomes. Connecting this data, providers can incorporate predictive modeling of patient risk to better profile an entire population, not just those who they have treated.

President and CEO of the Cincinnati-based Catholic Health Partners, Michael D. Connelly, M.A., J.D., FACHE, sums it up well when he says, “With this information we can further build out the predictive capabilities that will help us find opportunities and enact corrective actions before they affect patients. This initiative is a critical foundational piece to our mission…to improve the health of our communities.”

Stakeholders across a health system all can benefit from PremierConnect. For instance, an infection preventionist can be alerted to possible harm-related events within their system through real-time, house-wide surveillance. They can also better coordinate care with other departments, such as Pharmacy, to ensure the proper drugs are administered.

And a supply chain executive can interact with peers nationwide to get feedback on products they’re considering for contracts so they can make purchasing decisions based not just on price but also quality and safety based on thousands of outcomes.

What we’ve built mirrors what we’re trying to do in healthcare – build a system that is coordinated and integrated, where communication is dramatically improved and we aren’t unnecessarily repeating work.

That’s the vision for where we’re going. And when we work together to build a unified vision based on the innovations we know are out there, we can adapt and we can improve.

Technorati Tags: business analytics, healthcare, IBM

Basit Chaudhry, M.D., Ph.D., believes IBM Watson holds the key to better healthcare delivery

As a medical student in a large public hospital in New York City, Basit Chaudhry, M.D., first experienced one of the most vexing problems facing doctors today: How do you discover and deal with all the information that’s required to provide optimal care?

“So much of what doctors do today is about trying to figure out how to collect and aggregate all the necessary medical data,” Dr. Chaudhry said. “As I went further along in my training and practice it became more and more apparent to me that if we don’t solve this problem, it’s going to be difficult to build a better, more humane healthcare system.”

Motivated to make a difference, Dr. Chaudhry went on to get his Ph.D. in health services research and informatics and focus on applying technology to solve the medical data challenge. Today, as a medical scientist at IBM Research, Dr. Chaudhry is developing solutions to help clinicians manage and analyze the overwhelming amount of medical data and new knowledge available to them — and ultimately change the very foundation of how healthcare is delivered.

Managing the medical data deluge

One of the most promising initiatives Dr. Chaudhry is part of involves applying IBM Watson technology to support the cognitive activities involved in clinical care. Watson, a revolutionary computing system that can analyze the meaning and context of human language, is most famous for defeating two champions from the quiz show Jeopardy! last year.

“The main thing Watson does for medicine is that it allows us to better organize what we know about medicine and put it at the fingertips of the people who need to access it,” said Dr. Chaudhry, a clinical advisor to the Watson team. With new clinical research and medical information now estimated to double every five years, a tool to help clinicians find the data they require is crucial.

Using the same DeepQA technology that won Jeopardy!, Watson can pore through the equivalent of 200 million pages of medical data and formulate a response to clinicians’ queries in less than three seconds — helping them make more informed diagnosis and treatment decisions more quickly than ever before.

“Watson will allow medical professionals to focus more on their clinical activities and spend less time looking for information and sorting through paperwork,” Dr. Chaudhry said. “That’s going to mean better care and better patient outcomes.”

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Video — Perspectives on Watson: Healthcare

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thought leaders share their perspectives on how Watson could impact the way doctors diagnose and treat patients.

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Better care for chronic illness

One area where Watson may prove most valuable is in caring for patients with chronic diseases, such as diabetes and cancer, where a more proactive, team-based model of care is required than for patients with acute conditions.

“Taking care of chronically ill patients gets very complicated because it involves multiple healthcare professionals and often multiple organizations over a prolonged time frame — potentially decades,” Dr. Chaudhry said. “A lot of knowledge coordination and information integration is required.”

Watson has the potential to facilitate chronic disease management by better organizing the data and new knowledge clincians need to take proactive steps to improve prognoses and prolong life. According to Dr. Chaudhry, this may one day include integrating data from sensors that will indicate whether a patient is sticking to his or her medication schedule — a vital matter when it comes to chronic care.

Smarter health vs. smarter healthcare

Dr. Chaudhry’s long-range goal is not just to fix the current healthcare system, but to help realize a new model for healthcare altogether.

“I think smarter healthcare must be more focused on health rather than disease,” Dr. Chaudhry said. “Through the use of innovation I hope we can develop a different kind of health system — and I mean health, not just healthcare — that will be focused more on wellness and less on treating illness after the fact.”

According to Dr. Chaudhry, greater instrumentation is needed across society to provide data on the full range of factors that impact public health, so societies can make smarter decisions to ensure the health of their citizens.

“Watson could be the central nervous system of a much larger, instrumented architecture that integrates and analyzes this public health data to help yield a healthier population,” Dr. Chaudhry said.

For a flickr slide show about the use of Watson in healthcare, click here.

Technorati Tags: Basit Chaudhry, chronic illness