Basit Chaudhry, MD, PhD

Medical Scientist, IBM Research

The U.S. healthcare system is capable of producing breathtaking innovations that drive progress forward.  New frontiers open up on an almost regular basis. This is the “miracle of medicine.” At the same time, however, advancements made at the leading edge of science are slow to diffuse through the system and enormous inefficiencies exist in how scarce resources are used. Our ability to generate new scientific knowledge and develop advanced medical technologies has never been greater. Our ability to apply those innovations rationally in practice has not kept pace, unfortunately.

One of the major reasons for this disconnect has been the limited integration of data into the care delivery enterprise. Too often clinical decisions need to be made based on intuition and opinion alone, leading to significant variations in care and waste. Medical knowledge continues to expand at dizzying rates that push practicing state of the art medicine beyond the cognitive capacity of any individual. The absence of data and knowledge at the point of care helps create a gulf in quality between the science of medicine and it’s application in practice.

To address these issues, the Robert  H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and IBM organized a workshop of thought leaders to address how data analytics can be harnessed to transform healthcare. The purpose of the workshop was to explore how quantitative approaches pioneered in other fields such as operations management, statistics, economics and information science can be leveraged to help create new models for service delivery in healthcare.

While the problems of ever growing costs and variable quality in healthcare delivery are daunting. The good news is that pathways for improvement are emerging. Historically, quantitative data has been difficult to access due to low levels of information technology adoption in clinical care. This is changing rapidly. Over 40% of physician offices and 80% of hospitals have now adopted electronic health records. Large scale clinical and financial data assets are emerging as never before, opening up the possibility for transforming healthcare like industries such as retail and manufacturing have already done.

Digitizing medical records isn’t enough however. For industry transformation to occur, that data needs to be analyzed and the results of that analysis integrated into the care delivery process; knowledge needs to diffuse into clinical workflows and back to patients in a continuous process.  In this way, new insights into how best to deliver care are generated, shared and amplified on an ongoing basis that will make care more convenient, higher value and ultimately more humane.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fashioning these new data driven approaches to care delivery will be challenging however given how clinical practice has traditionally been organized. The University of Maryland-IBM workshop explored how advanced data analytics can be applied to healthcare to spur innovation in service deliver at the point of care. An example of this kind of breakthrough is IBM Watson for Healthcare. This technology can analyze massive stores of structured and unstructured medical data and provide answers to clinical questions posed in natural human language.

Rising costs and deficits in quality have made transforming the healthcare system a national priority. While the problems are significant, promising solutions exist and are already being put into practice around the country. Innovation is needed but at the same time we don’t have to reinvent the proverbial wheel. Learning from how other fields and other industries can provide a vital map for changing the value proposition that the healthcare system offers the country.

Drawing insight from data has been fundamental to the advancement of industries around the globe, creating vibrant change such as increasing productivity and improving customer service. Similarly, large scale innovation is possible in how we deliver and pay for healthcare. Analytics will be vital to this transformation as well. The lessons are there. We now have the tools to learn in healthcare as well.

Researchers at The State University of New York at Buffalo are using a new approach to computing  in an attempt to identify the causes and promising therapies. We’re conducting a TweetChat on Thursday, May 10, from 12 to 1 p.m. ET at  Twitter hashtag #IBMDataChat. Please join the conversation about using technology to help defeat MS.

Participants:
·    Shawn Dolley, IBM VP of Big Data Healthcare & Life Sciences (Moderator), @shawndolley
·    Dr. Murali Ramanathan, SUNY Buffalo Professor Pharmaceutical Sciences and Neurology, Director of Graduate Studies & Co-Director, Data Intensive Discovery Initiative, @M_Ramanathan
·    David Smith, Revolution Analytics R Evangelist & VP of Marketing, @revodavid
·    Tim Coetzee, National MS Society Chief Research Officer, @tim_coetzee

Technorati Tags: IBM, MS, Multiple Sclerosis, The State University of New York at Buffalo

Multiple sclerosis is a cruel disease. It typically strikes young adults. The body’s own immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, resulting in physical disabilities, cognitive problems and a host of other chronic symptoms. The cause isn’t known. There is no cure.

Fortunately, the amount of biomedical and clinical data related to MS has exploded over the past decade, and, at the same time, new research methods make it possible to assess environmental factors and hundreds of thousands of genetic variations taken from single samples.

Researchers at The State University of New York at Buffalo are using a new approach to computing  in an attempt to identify the causes and promising therapies. “The eventual goal is to help develop a cure or prevention for MS,” says Dr. Murali Ramanathan, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences and neurology at SUNY Buffalo. “The ability to do this kind of computational analysis is a great complement to basic science and clinical research.”

Ramanathan is one of two researchers leading the Data Intensive Discovery Initiative, or DI2, which is focused on developing new algorithms and modeling techniques for analyzing genetic and environmental factors in multiple sclerosis. They also train graduate students.

He and his colleagues believe that MS is caused by a complex combination of gene-to-gene and gene-to-environment interactions. The chief environmental factors include living far from the equator, viral infections and cigarette smoking. They evaluate a wide range of factors, including gender, geography, ethnicity, diet, exercise, sun exposure and living and working conditions. The clinical data include medical records, lab results, MRI scans and patient surveys.

The researchers are using a computer cluster from IBM’s Netezza that combines processing, a database, storage and analytics into a single system, or appliance. This data-intensive architecture makes it possible to handle large amounts of data and derive insights quickly. The Buffalo researchers have found that analyses that once took days can now be completed in mere minutes.

Previously, Ramanathan used conventional parallel processing on a cluster of computer servers to crunch his data. Those systems divide large problems into smaller ones and solve them concurrently using hundreds or thousands of processors. The Netezza system also takes advantage of parallel processing. But, in addition, it uses specialized processor chips to filter the data that’s sitting in on storage disks before passing along only the relevant pieces to the main processors. At the same time, the system performs some of the analysis as the data is moving off the disks, rather than handling all of it on the main processors. So the design, essentially, moves a lot of the processing to the data rather than moving so much data to the microprocessors. As a result, the work can be done faster and more efficiently.

It took Ramanathan months to warm up to this approach to number crunching, but now he’s a huge fan. “I believe that the vast majority of problems in clinical and biomedical research will be addressed through this new way of computing,” he says.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Murali Ramanathan, SUNY Buffalo

But technology can be a powerful asset in the fight against counterfeiting. And the good news is Sproxil and IBM are showing the way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click on the image below to open the slideshow version.

The IBM Curiosity Shop on Pinterest

Technorati Tags: africa, counterfeit drugs, healthcare, mobile, Smarter Healthcare, Sproxil, supply chain

In the U.S., large scale drug counterfeiting is rare, but in some parts of the world, particularly in developing nations, it’s rampant. This makes fighting treatable diseases like malaria – which kills a million people every year — extremely difficult. According to the World Health Organization, about 200,000 of the world’s malaria deaths alone can be linked to ineffective treatment resulting from counterfeit anti-malarials.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors globally are now experimenting with ways to combat counterfeiting by creating a smarter pharmaceutical supply. My company, Sproxil, provides a cloud-based service called Mobile Product Authentication™ (MPA) that allows consumers to use their mobile phones to determine if their medicine is genuine, at point of purchase, in a matter of seconds. Each package using the MPA service bears a label with a unique PIN as well as a text number. At the point of purchase, the consumer scratches the label to reveal the PIN code, then sends it to our authentication service via a free text message. Within seconds, a reply is sent back indicating whether the drug is genuine or counterfeit.

I’m proud that in January we reached a milestone within regions of Africa where consumers have used MPA technology one million times to verify their medication.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m equally proud of the partnerships that have enabled us to play a critical role in combating drug counterfeiting – from leading pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Merck and GlaxoSmithKline Johnson & Johnson, to technology leaders including IBM.

Through IBM’s SmartCamp program, we’ve made important connections with both potential clients and business partners. Using IBM ILOG technology, our pharmaceutical clients can now manage their data more easily through an enhanced dashboard view of all drug purchases and counterfeiting incidents, including charts and graphics based on real-time data.

Like medicine, information technology can be a life-saving tool, but it must be supported by national drug regulatory authorities committed to education, training and enforcement. We must also remember that while today’s technologies can outsmart counterfeiters, that may not be true tomorrow; counterfeiters desperately want to stay in what is unfortunately a profitable business.
Through a continuous cycle of collaboration – government creating and enforcing laws, pharmaceutical companies committed to protecting products and innovators leveraging technology to create cost-effective solutions – we can stay one step ahead.

Technorati Tags: Ashifi Gogo, ibm smartcamp, Sproxil

We’re pleased to announce the line-up for IBM SmartCamp 2012. This is our program for helping entrepreneurs who are developing products and services that make the world work better. Entrepreneurs who participate gain access to mentors who understand their industry and can help them develop their businesses. Also, networking and publicity can lead to venture funding.

We plan more than 17 SmartCamp events worldwide this year. The schedule starts in Miami on May 15th, with a new format focused on healthcare. Over the last two years we have seen growing interest in certain topics and believe the timing is right to have dedicated events. These one- and two-day events will bring together entrepreneurs, mentors and investors in particular industries allowing a more focused discussion.  We will follow Miami up with New York on May 24th with a focus on Smart Cities. The New York event was planned to coincide with TechCrunch Disrupt NYC,  to allow mentors and companies to make the most of the community.

For more information and to apply, you can get started here.

The IBM SmartCamp initiative has been a big success since its launch in 2010. Companies have received significant press in Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Bloomberg, and raised over $50M in venture capital. Some startups have have begun to work closely with IBM and expand their businesses.  In addition, the program is now live in 15 countries. We are very grateful to the network of over 400 experienced mentors who give their time to work with these companies.

This year, we are introducing a new category of start-up that will continue to the global finals event.  To ensure we continue to recognize the best early stage companies around the world we will now have a ‘best newcomer’ category at each event.  We think combining this new category with our more traditional selection criteria will allow us to identify a strong, diverse group of companies for the 2012 IBM SmartCamp Global Finals.

We are keen to hear your opinions and have included a short survey to get your views on what we need to change and improve.  The survey will take no more than 3 minutes to complete and we’ll be happy to share the results with you. Please click here.

Otherwise, we hope we’ll see you soon at one of the events in the near future.

Schedule – KickStart Events

·    Miami (15th May – healthcare focus)
·    New York (24th May – smart cities focus)
·    Munich (20th June)
·    Bangalore (18th July)
·    Tel Aviv (12th Sept)
·    Moscow (mid Sept)
·    Paris (28th Sept)
·    Istanbul (3rd Oct)
·    London (5th Oct)
·    Cape Town (10th Oct)
·    Mexico City (11th Oct)
·    Moscow (mid Oct)
·    Dublin (25th Oct)

Schedule – Regional Finals
These events will feed into the regional finals in the following locations
·    Asia – Beijing (23rd/24th Sept)
·    Europe\Middle East \Africa – Berlin (13th/14thNov)
·    North America – Boston (20th/21st June)
·    South America – Sao Paolo (28th/29th Nov)

It is hard to believe that in just over two years SmartCamp has expanded from a pilot in Dublin to a global program.  We are totally dependent on the support of our partners and while IBM is a huge company, we realize that for the planet to become smarter we need a global ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors – all focused on the same prize of making the world work better.

Technorati Tags: ibm smartcamp, Martin Kelly

Harry Reynolds

IBM Director Health Industry Transformation

What if your physician knew you as well as a personal shopper? Or how about if your health insurance provider could suggest the most advantageous plan the way your cell phone carrier recommends the latest family plan?

While the tongue depressor hasn’t changed in years, new influences such as social media, the mobile revolution and higher expectations from consumers are forcing healthcare organizations to rethink the way they deal with patients.

We are entering the age of the empowered health consumer. Consider that 50 million consumers will enter the individual and exchange insurance market by 2017. Additionally, a 40 percent decline in group health care coverage is expected by 2017. Meanwhile, annual private healthcare spending will increase by $430 billion by 2015.

Consumers now have unprecedented access to information about medicine and health care. As a result they’re becoming more demanding and better informed about the care they receive. Combine this new reality with the transition going on in healthcare and the industry will certainly face looking at patients and their health differently. Many organizations are even rethinking their business models.

This week during the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., we’re discussing this new reality and the need for healthcare to be more consumer focused. Together we’ll explore what it will take to enable healthcare providers and insurance companies to connect and collaborate with patients better.

Taking a page from the retail industry playbook, can these types of organizations apply the retail mentality to better understand and influence consumer behavior through vast amounts of data? In all of this, analytics is key. Understanding the individual and providing a more personalized view of the patient will help organizations compete in a new era of healthcare transformation. This kind of insight can be used to keep patients healthier.

We are barreling through unprecedented change in the healthcare industry. Everything is changing with new competitors, new opportunities and new challenges. One thing is clear, better information just might enable better care.

View a Slideshare of Harry Reynolds’ presentation at World Health Care Congress.

Coming from IBM Research, I think of innovation in two dimensions.  First, there is the continuous innovation that goes into IBM’s products and services.  This innovation provides important advances to current technology as well as helps IBM introduce breakthrough products.  The benefits of this approach are clear in IBM’s next-generation computing platform PureSystems.

But we also look for more exploratory challenges that help us advance science by leaps and bounds.  We call them grand challenges.  Meeting them requires a very different set of practices and capabilities – and presents some interesting problems.

And that was the topic today as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington, DC hosted a forum with the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, IBM and Qualcomm to discuss how we can meet the next Grand Challenges.

So, what makes a grand challenge?  It must be difficult, inspiring and risky.  These are scientific game-changers by nature – with broad implications for industry and society alike.  Some call them ‘moon shots.’

And as the Apollo program of the 1960′s proved, grand challenges often demand new, cross-discipline thinking and rich models of collaboration among various institutions.

Creating a computer that could compete against human chess champions was a grand challenge. Since the late 1960’s popular wisdom suggested it would be impossible for a computer to ever beat a human grand chess master.   The Deep Blue computer’s winning match against Gary Kasparov in 1997 was a landmark in showing that we understood computing technology enough to take on the task – one we thought was restricted to human intelligence.

The late 1990’s saw a grand challenge of another kind.  In 1997, the Japanese government announced plans to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer – the ‘Earth Simulator.’ In 1999, IBM announced plans to build a new class of high performance computing system that would be even more powerful. BlueGene would go on to, among many other things, crack the complex problem of protein folding.The project represented a deep collaboration between IBM, the Department of Energy and the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration – in a shared mission to apply the new technology at extreme scales in a highly energy-efficient manner.  And in 2004, it would become the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Our newest grand challenge is of course the IBM Watson computer.  In the mid-2000′s it had become increasingly clear that deep search and deep analytics were becoming a challenge for commercial computers. Watson was developed to tackle question/answer problems on the largest of scales – and it famously showcased that capability in its Jeopardy! victory.

We continue to pursue this challenge today, extending Watson’s capabilities to industry, medicine and science.  This requires deep collaboration with domain experts like Citi and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

These models of collaboration are quickly becoming the standard for tackling today’s grand challenges.  This is why we work closely with our partners as well as encourage our own researchers to work across disciplines.  These are the things that produce the big breakthroughs – and are the blueprint for addressing the grand challenges of tomorrow.

IBM created a culture that embraces the idea of tackling the most difficult challenges. It’s been a priority for us no matter the business environment, so when necessary, we made the tough choices that allowed us to continue investing in the future.

By working together, with both private and public entities to drive research and innovation, we will continue to tackle the world’s largest problems, transforming society and making the world work better.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Qualcomm, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

To me, the recently-announced collaboration between my institution, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and IBM is of profound importance for reasons both obvious and more subtle. The obvious reasons concern what we may call knowledge. The subtle ones would be apparent only to those of us who care for patients on a daily basis and concern what we may call wisdom. Let me explain what I mean by the distinction.

First: What is the project? Our two organizations plan on applying IBM’s Watson technology, which impressed all of us by beating two grand-champions on the Jeopardy! TV quiz show, to MSKCC’s vast store of cancer case histories, utilizing the skills of expert computer scientists and highly experienced cancer doctors. The goal is to develop a tool to help physicians all over the world better care for their patients with cancer.

We live in a time of massive expansion of knowledge about cancer. Biological scientists all over the world, including at MSKCC, are producing information continuously, including information about the molecules that go awry to cause cancer in the first place. Furthermore, there is a steady stream of clinical research advances in the diagnosis and management of cancers of all types.

To be useful in patient management all of these bits of information need to be gathered and assimilated and made practical. For decades MSKCC has had specialized cancer physicians and scientists focused on the production and accumulation of such knowledge. In addition, we have used this information in the care of our patients and we freely share our knowledge as well. For example, colleagues around the world frequently call us to discuss difficult or unusual cases. By asking questions and exchanging information the treating physician and the MSKCC specialist arrive at a management plan that is best for that particular patient at that moment in time.

But this is not an efficient process. Most patients with cancer in the world are not treated by specialists in their type of cancer. The physicians treating them do have access to written guidelines and other sources of information, but that is not the same as having an experienced, specialized medical expert immediately available. Hence, we have long sought a means of bringing up-to-date knowledge to the bedside of every cancer patient.

But how can we do that when there is so much information, when it is constantly changing, when it needs to be interpreted, and when it is in the form of language with all of its subtleties and nuances?

Along comes IBM Watson.

Here we have the confluence of two highly developed areas of intellectual activity. At MSKCC we not only have extensive experience in the care of tens of thousand of cancer patients—how they have been treated and their outcomes as well—but we have this in written form. This is because of our use of a sophisticated electronic medical record system, meticulously constructed so as to capture all of the relevant clinical information in a way that absolutely protects patient privacy.

In Watson we have a computer system that can read and understand language, interact with human experts, and remember everything it has ever learned.  And it can use this knowledge to arrive at answers to real-life questions.

As medical educators, we take young doctors and educate them to be expert cancer specialists in a few years, and we do this by teaching in English. Now we have a machine that can be taught in English and will never forget the knowledge we impart. And, by constantly learning, the machine will also produce new research questions that will help us improve the state of the art as we learn together.

But, one may ask, what about the human side of the equation? Medical decisions are not just about information: they are also about judgment. As experienced physicians we need to take everything into account in arriving at a best management plan—not just the individual patient’s biology and the biology of their disease, but social, psychological, environmental, motivational and interpersonal factors.

It is here that the less obvious advantages to our project become paramount. These personal elements are captured in the language of our case histories, and Watson will learn them–while remaining ignorant of patient identity. Furthermore, Watson will not make decisions, but will interact with the on-site physician in asking the right questions to help the patient and the doctor arrive at the right decision for that particular individual. The human is never left out of the conversation. And that humanity—never before captured in guidelines or lists of therapeutic options—is what makes this project unique: It goes beyond mere knowledge, as important as that is, by entering the realm of human wisdom.

So I see the IBM-MSKCC collaboration as a way of bringing wisdom as well as knowledge to the care of cancer patients anywhere in the world. And that is the essence of why I see this project as one of profound importance.

Technorati Tags: Dr. Larry Norton, ibm watson, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the United States, and, according to the American Cancer Society, more than 1.6 million new cases are expected to be diagnosed this year. Discoveries in molecular biology and genetics in recent years have produced new insights into cancer biology, but these advances have also ratcheted up the complexity of diagnosing and treating each case.

The disease is one of the most important fields of medicine, yet it’s devilishly complex and there’s too much information for any single practitioner to keep up with.

A collaboration announced today between Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and IBM could revolutionize how physicians  in the United States and worldwide get access to world-class information about cancer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our two organizations are combining IBM Watson’s natural language processing and machine learning capabilities with Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s clinical knowledge and repository of cancer case histories. We aim to develop a decision support tool that can help physicians everywhere arrive at individualized cancer diagnostic and treatment recommendations for their patients based on the most complete and up-to-date information.

I credit leaders at Memorial Sloan-Kettering for envisioning a way to have a huge impact on cancer treatment worldwide. Patricia Skarulis, the organization’s chief information officer, first approached us last April, shortly after she watched the Watson computer defeat two past grand-champions on the Jeopardy! TV quiz show. She said MSK had collected more than a decade’s worth of digitized information about cancer–including treatments and outcomes for all of their patients–which could be mined for insights and made widely available.

She thought Watson could help. We decided to work together to try to make that happen. And, today, we believe the goal is attainable.

Since Watson’s television victory last year,  IBM has been on a path to improving the technology. We’re making it possible for people to engage Watson in ongoing dialogues aimed at surfacing the most useful insights. After receiving an initial query, Watson will be able to ask for additional information to help it understand more precisely what the human wants to know. Also, people will be able to view the logic and evidence upon which Watson makes a recommendation.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s oncologists will assist in developing IBM Watson to use a patient’s medical information combined with a vast array of medical information–including an extensive library of medical literature, diagnosis and treatment guidelines, a database of MSK cancer cases and the institution’s knowledge management system. Watson will learn from its encounters with clinicians. It will also get smarter as it amasses more information and correlates treatments with outcomes.

Our two organizations will spend most of this year loading Watson with information. This data will be used to train a version of Watson created specifically for this task. Then, starting late this year and continuing in 2013, we’ll run a pilot program focused on the diagnosis and treatment of a handful of cancers, including lung, prostate and breast cancer.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering is one of the most accomplished cancer treatment centers in the world. But, when you do the math, you see that only a small percentage of cancer patients are able to receive care at MSK and other world-renown institutions.

The vast majority of patients are treated by physicians who don’t have access to the more advanced knowledge that MSK oncologists possess. If MSK and IBM succeed at developing an effective decision-support tool, physicians anywhere could potentially have access to the knowledge of some of the field’s top experts–and more cancer patients could get better care no matter where they live in the world.

Can you think of other fields where IBM Watson could help bring specialized expertise to the masses?

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Here’s a link to a post about the hookup between IBM and WellPoint, the giant health benefits company, which is complimentary to the MSK relationship.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Watson