Karen Parrish, Vice President, Industry Solutions, IBM

By Karen Parrish

This week, professionals from around the world are attending eHealthWeek to discuss trends, innovations and solutions to address the ongoing challenges in healthcare. There certainly won’t be a lack of data and discussion about cost, wellness, aging populations and dealing with chronic conditions. While there are plenty of opinions, what’s missing from this deluge of points of view is a holistic approach to meeting needs of individuals – an approach IBM calls Smarter Care.

We’ve known for decades that health and social systems are interdependent and have a critical impact on each other. Yet the complex matrix of public and private stakeholders in the health and well-being of citizens still operate largely within silos, providing separate and disparate care. 

For example, does your grandmother’s home health aide understand the new therapy prescribed to her? Does the social services worker have insight into the medical issues behind her disability? Does the social security office understand how her benefits should be determined at this stage in her life? Does the pharmacist down the street realize that her doctor just gave her a sample for a new blood thinner that may interact with her other medications?  While these caregivers, agencies and social services support organizations all have her well-being in mind, many times – not necessarily to any fault of their own – they lack insight and collaboration to see the bigger picture.

The promise of Smarter Care is that the health and well-being of an individual can be mapped out over a lifetime, helping him or her make informed decisions and just as importantly, aiding the healthcare and social services ecosystem to know what to do. At each state of an individual’s life, the end goal is to know when to incorporate preventive care, thereby lowering risks and everyone’s costs. The result: healthier and more prosperous citizens and communities.

So how do we get to Smarter Care? With access to unprecedented amounts of Big Data, forward- looking organizations and governments are creating new opportunities to observe, analyze and coordinate the interconnections between social determinants, clinical factors and lifestyle choices.

Take the case of Catalonia, Spain. Sixty percent of its population over 65 has chronic diseases and consumes 70 percent of the region’s healthcare resources. Through a pilot program, the Catalan Institute of Health is working closely with the Catalonian government to tackle the problem through a more coordinated chronic disease management process. The organizations are pulling together information that previously resided in more than 20 databases and many custom and commercial applications to provide a holistic view of each patient.

In the Region of Southern Denmark (RSD), 22 percent of the citizens suffer from some form of a chronic illness, including about 70,000 who suffer from heart disease. To combat this problem, RSD is launching a pilot program with IBM to facilitate real-time communication among patients, physicians, pharmacists, mental health professionals and specialists so all parties have insight into patient care plans.

Smarter Care is a new way of thinking for private and public sector organizations. It delivers on the promise of holistic and individualized care, focusing on people, not programs. This is our opportunity to help address quality, costs and outcomes, and drive individual wellness and community vitality.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, healthcare, holistic care, IBM Smarter Planet, patient care, Smarter Healthcare

Terry F. Yosie, President and CEO of the World Environment Center

By Terry F. Yosie

Environmental issues are big, thorny problems. Scarcities in water, food and raw materials are too complex for any single company or non-governmental organization to solve on its own.  In order to make a difference, it’s necessary to collaborate with like-minded partners to achieve shared goals.

Collaboration is a normal feature of customer-supplier relationships, government-business partnerships and initiatives with universities and other partners. It’s also typical for organizations looking for new business models that can sustain profitability while addressing societal needs, natural resource management, product and service innovation, and differentiation of brand value, to name a few.  Collaboration can spur organizations to redefine their business purpose by utilizing society as another kind of R&D lab for innovation. 

Coca-Cola’s Global Water Strategy is a good example. Water is clearly essential to the company’s business – for its beverages and also for growing the agricultural products they need. The company instituted a global program to promote water resource sustainability. It set global strategic direction on water, established policy and requirements, and formed and managed key partnerships with organizations such as the WWF and USAID.

Another example is IBM’s work with cities in emerging economies such as Africa. It requires years of building on-the-ground relationships and capabilities while turning projects into partnerships that generate positive economic, environmental and social results. IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge – the company’s single largest philanthropic initiative — deploys teams of employees to work with cities around the world to deliver detailed recommendations addressing key urban issues identified by local elected officials and other stakeholders. A recent report, “A Vision for Smarter Growth: an IBM Smarter Cities Report on Accra, Ghana” highlights how this rapidly emerging West African city should turn to technology to transform key city systems such as transportation and energy.

Many companies are still finding their footing as they try to build global collaboration to match their global business strategies. This requires a “system-level” understanding of societal and environmental changes that can transform global economy and society. At the World Environment Center, we’re seeing more companies beginning to recognize how issues such as population growth, urbanization, food security and natural resource management may affect their business and impact return on investment.

Such decisions rarely occur in a vacuum. For example, investment decisions to upgrade power generation should take into account interconnected energy and water use in building design and maintenance. Only a “system-level” understanding of goals will enable companies to develop more innovative approaches to understanding both customer and societal needs.

For collaboration to succeed on a larger scale, we need global networks of companies, national agencies, NGOs and foundations, such as those created to eradicate malaria. Organizations can jointly develop licensing standards and transparency practices. They can work towards specific goals, performance metrics, and accountable behaviors to make a difference — from individual projects, to Big Bang transformational initiatives.

Collaboration is key to developing solutions to the mounting global challenges of current and future generations.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, Earth Day, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Public Health, Smarter Planet, sustainability

Jessica Brown, Senior Programme Editor, Asia-Pacific, The Economist

By Jessica Brown

Asian countries are at very different stages of development. This is nowhere truer than in healthcare policy. Some countries have very well developed — even rigid — healthcare systems. In others, the healthcare system is evolving rapidly.

Across much of the region, a window of opportunity has opened. Some governments are at risk of repeating mistakes made in other parts of the world. Yet other innovative policymakers and providers are forging a different path to the long-established healthcare systems of the West. Many are trying to learn from the mistakes others have made. The best are leapfrogging ahead to new models of healthcare provision.

Healthcare innovation in Asia is taking many different forms. In the Philippines, a new sin tax on alcohol and tobacco will fund the extension of the national health insurance scheme Philhealth. In Thailand, patients must pay extra to bypass primary care in an effort to ease the burden on a financially stretched hospital system. In South Korea, a performance management system has been created to address problems such as the over-prescription of antibiotics. 

One way Asian countries are innovating is through their use of technology. At The Economist’s recent Healthcare in Asia summit, held in Kuala Lumpur on March 21-22, delegates discussed projects including mobile intensive care units in rural India staffed remotely by expert doctors, SMS services which prompt patients to seek medication or book a check-up, and even online games designed to educate sufferers of chronic kidney disease about their condition.

Malaysian Health Minister, Liow Tiong Lai, addresses The Economist’s Healthcare in Asia 2013 summit.

Technology is also helping developing Asian healthcare systems to rein in costs. After the 2003 SARS outbreak, the Chinese government developed an internet based communicable disease reporting system. The government used these data to force hospitals to refer TB patients to special government-run TB clinics designed to provide cost effective specialist services.

Some of the best healthcare innovations in Asia use high-tech methods to facilitate low-tech, but effective, solutions. In Indonesia, President Yudhoyono has set up a special task force to ensure the country meets its Millennium Development Goal targets by 2015. The taskforce uses social media (Indonesia has more than 50 million Facebook users) to recruit health professionals under 30 years of age to undergo intensive training. Their training includes advocacy, leadership, project management, financial management and even survival training in the jungle. Once trained, the workers are sent to remote villages across Indonesia’s 15,000 islands on one-year rotations. Here, their role is to act as change-agents on issues like maternal health, nutrition, HIV/AIDS and clean water, and to help build resilience among local communities.

It may be premature to point to a new ‘Asian model’ of healthcare. Too many of the region’s healthcare systems seem stuck in the old hospital-centric model. Others want to reform, but face entrenched interests and political roadblocks. However, the level of innovation now taking place around the region suggests it is not far fetched to think that such a model could emerge in the future. The key for policymakers now is to take advantage of the window of opportunity while it remains firmly open.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Public Health, Smarter Healthcare, Smarter Planet, The Economist

Graham Mackintosh, Business Executive, Social Analytics, IBM Software Group

By Graham Mackintosh

 Social sentiment analysis is the new darling in the world of digital marketing and Big Data analytics.  But while making sense of opinions posted publicly on Twitter sounds easy, it’s not.  It’s a lot more complex if you’re looking at the meaning and tone of natural language conveyed by Twitter’s fire hose of 200 million active users.

Telemetry is the science of measuring data at a distance over communications networks.  When put in this context, social media can be thought of as “human telemetry” – a virtual town square where we can understand our social interactions and preferences by analyzing everything that is said and shared via blogs and tweets.

Human telemetry applies to more than trending topics on Twitter. Consider healthcare. Within an urban center, regional hospitals already exchange real-time information – such as admission rates and bed-space data — to help with ambulance routing and finding the right type of doctor.

Including “human telemetry” data completes the picture. Making sense of the text in postings requires advances in text analytics and novel techniques to improve accuracy, even when people enter comments with slang, spelling mistakes, ambiguities and sarcasm.

Perhaps dozens of worried parents begin posting concerns via social media about their children’s severe flu symptoms, all within the same metropolitan area. This could be an important leading indicator for hospital capacity planners.

Moreover, if this pattern of social postings expands in volume and geographic scope, analysis will transcend any given neighborhood or city. It could provide deeper insight for pandemic detection for the World Health Organization or the Center for Disease Control, helping to identify and manage healthcare problems at and earlier stage, before they spread.

The very nature of social media means that the lines between systems and human telemetry are increasingly blurred. For example, many of us follow Twitter users who are not actual people. They are computer systems posting Tweets on useful information, from regional traffic updates to flight information.

Conversely, personal devices, such as smart phones, can publish the owner’s geographic location to other people in their social network. The phone owner thinks of that device’s telemetry as a part of his or her social media presence.  Think of it as human telemetry in the palm of your hand.

This convergence and blurring of human and system data opens the way for new analytic applications.  We will see apps that reduce congestion on roads by analyzing data from traffic sensors and insights gleaned from commuter blogs. Or apps that create more personalized retail offers that combine sales data with chatter from Twitter, blogs and comments.

This combined perspective of natural language and hard data will lead to deeper analysis that not only reveals trends and hotspots, but also uncovers the human element of why we do what we do.

We did this recently with the IBM Social Sentiment Index, which looked at traffic in a handful of cities in France, Netherlands, Spain and Germany. We found that in the city of Lyon, France, sentiment around rush hour is positive (40%) with essentially no negative sentiment.  The city has embarked upon an ambitious project to build a more sustainable transportation network, which suggests that citizens are recognizing the efforts of the city of Lyon to improve systems there.

This shows how human telemetry can benefit society. It hinges on using big data together with advances in analytics and natural language processing.  And to prove successful these applications must have reliable and useful information, such as sentiment, that can be extracted from social media content.

The innovation in text analytics will continue.  We’ll see advances such as guided machine learning technologies for sentiment analysis that can be trained and tuned with examples to continually improve its accuracy.  But more importantly, these advances can be used to make the planet smarter, where instrumented systems can gain  insights into data that is truly interconnected – including  “human telemetry” from social media.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, IBM, IBM Smarter Planet, Smarter Cities, social business, social sentiment, Social Web, Telemetry, traffic congestion, transportation

Ashish Soni, Executive Director of Digital Innovation at USC Viterbi School of Engineering

By Ashish Soni

At USC, innovation is at the forefront of our curriculum and culture. As the Founding Director of the Viterbi Student Institute for Innovation, I am always looking for new ways to build a culture of innovation, one where our students have the freedom to cultivate new ideas and see them through to the next level.
 
That’s exactly what we were able to accomplish at USC last month when we collaborated with IBM on the first-ever West Coast Watson Academic Case Competition. More than 100 students across the university came together to put their critical thinking skills to the test and develop new applications for IBM’s Watson technology – and it was a huge success. 
 
As the world grows ever more complex due to the skyrocketing volume of Big Data, technologies like IBM’s Watson are piquing the interest of our students by allowing them to realize the true potential of what cognitive computing can achieve.

I was delighted to see their expressions when they viewed a demonstration of how Watson’s cognitive computing skills are helping doctors deliver better, more personalized and effective treatment to cancer patients, faster than ever before. It was no surprise that we received such an overwhelming response from our students for the opportunity to put their own strategic thinking behind how Watson’s technology can be further applied to solve business or societal challenges. 
 
It was amazing to see how quickly students from all different departments and majors quickly came together to collaborate on this project. Students from the Viterbi School of Engineering joined forces with those from the Marshall School of Business and there was no shortage of great ideas. The way the students from different disciplines worked together is similar to how IBM creates new technology and offerings – looking across various areas to find common relationships and ways to connect them. We saw innovative applications of Watson’s technology proposed for a number of different sectors – from healthcare and law to human resources. We saw how Watson could be used to not only identify evidence, but even forecast the probability of success in a law case. We saw how a Watson-powered employee training system could help HR managers improve employee satisfaction and retention. We even saw how Watson could help doctors potentially identify and treat victims of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
 
What our students gained from this experience was tremendous. Not only were they exposed to the next generation of computing technology, they demonstrated they had the capacity to think strategically, work collaboratively and present their findings within a set timeframe. They learned how to distill a large, complex problem into individual elements and map a technology solution back to it. As the demand for analytics and data science skills continues to grow, exposure to experiences like this will prove invaluable for our students as they look to take their first steps outside of the classroom and into the real world. 
 
As the era of cognitive computing unfolds before our eyes, innovators will be in high demand — those with the ability to turn complex data into actionable insight. At USC, we know our students will be up for the challenge.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, IBM Smarter Planet, ibm watson, IBM Watson Solutions, innovation, smart healthcare, smarter analytics, smarter collaboration, USC

Dr. Mark Kris, Chief, Thoracic Oncology Service, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

By Mark Kris, M.D.

As a longtime fan of the TV game show, Jeopardy!, I was fascinated when I watched an IBM supercomputer named Watson beat all-time  Jeopardy! champions, two years ago this month.

I was particularly interested because my friend and colleague Larry Norton had previously alerted me to the fact that systems like IBM Watson could be harnessed to improve cancer care and research. Combining the abilities to process massive amounts of data and using natural language processing could not only accomplish amazing things….like winning Jeopardy!, but also revolutionize care and research, accelerating progress for people with cancers. After a year on this project, I remain as excited today as I was on day one.

Over the past year, we at Memorial Sloan-Kettering have worked with an IBM team to train Watson to help assist medical professionals in choosing treatments for lung and breast cancers. We are sharing our knowledge and expertise in oncology to help Watson learn everything it can about cancer care and how Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s experts use medical information and their experience in personalized cancer treatments.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cancers are illnesses that continually humble doctors. A major leap forward in understanding these diseases over the last 40 years is realizing the complexity of these illnesses.  You may notice that I have been using the word cancers instead of cancer. I do it deliberately, as a reflection of what we have learned. Doctors treating these illnesses know how different they are from person to person. We need better ways to help us understand the complexity and variation of these diseases to improve care and research. Textbook and guideline-based treatments are a good place to start but they can’t address the many biological and other factors affecting the course and aggressiveness of cancers. 

Current guidelines aren’t granular enough to determine treatments best matched to the person with the illness. The guideline recommended treatment may be chemotherapy, but how do you pick among 10 or more possible chemo options?  How do you choose the dosage? What treatment frequency would work best? Oncologists learn ways to make these choices from their experience treating individual patients. That kind of wisdom is what the Memorial Sloan-Kettering team is adding to IBM Watson. Our hope is to share our experience and knowledge, and, enabled by Watson technology, help physicians around the world to understand and mine the subtleties of each person’s illness. We believe this strategy can take us one step closer to the goal of personalized care for every person facing cancer treatment.

The power of the technology is that it has the ability to take the information about a specific patient and match it to a huge knowledge base and history of treatment of similar patients. This process can help medical professionals gain important insights so that they can make more informed decisions, evidence based decisions, about what treatment to follow. Watson’s ability to mine massive quantities of data means that it can also keeps up – at record speeds – with the latest medical breakthroughs reported in scientific journals and meetings.

Today, I join IBM, our partner WellPoint and many other healthcare leaders in New York City to mark a milestone on the path to bringing the power of Watson to oncology care. In collaboration with IBM and WellPoint, we will unveil the first commercially developed Watson-based cognitive computing system that is being taught by Memorial Sloan-Kettering experts. We believe these innovations will help transform the quality and speed of care for patients and enhance research to lead to more cures.

One of the big goals for Memorial Sloan Kettering and IBM Watson is to improve the quality of care delivered to persons with cancers:  every person, every time, and that it will learn with every encounter, continually getting smarter.

It can also help to reduce the time and documentation required to get an approval to start treatment. It is an interesting aspect of the project that using a machine can actually allow doctors and nurses more time to focus on patients, rather than paperwork.

I’m sure that applying the Watson technology to oncology has the power to transform cancer care so that our healthcare providers can dedicate more time toward delivering the best possible care.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, healthcare, ibm watson, innovation, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, patient care, Watson, WellPoint

Samuel Blum, James Wynne and Rangaswamy Srinivasan

Today, interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the pillars of IBM’s  approach to advancing science and technology. And, in the coming years, as scientific fields collide with increasing frequency, the ability of scientists to build bridges between their domains will likely be one of the core competencies for research organizations–whether corporate, governmental or academic.

The three IBM Research scientists showed how it’s done. For their efforts, James Wynne, the physicist; Rangaswamy Srinivasan, the chemist; and Samuel Blum, the materials scientist, will be honored at the White House today when President Obama presents the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. (Unfortunately, Blum died a few weeks ago. Srinivasan is no longer at IBM.)  This is just the most recent of many honors the three men have received over the years, but for Wynne the greatest satisfaction lies closer to home. “The best thing for me is that I invented something that corrected my own son’s eyesight,” he says.

The three men weren’t even thinking about eye surgery when they they began the work that led to their invention. They were simply looking for new things made possible by lasers. Scientists elsewhere had developed a new device, the excimer laser, which IBM Research had just acquired. Srinivasan and a co-worker discovered they could etch plastics (i.e. polymers) with this laser. Polymers share certain chemical features with skin and other human and animal tissue. Srinivasan and Wynn speculated about using the device on human tissue where something medical and surgical could be done with it. Wynne was aware that when we get  paper cuts on our fingers–thin and precise incisions–they would  heal without forming scar tissue. Perhaps they could use a laser in the same way, making a precise cut without causing collateral damage. “It was a wild guess, but it worked,” he says.

Their wild idea became a reality a few weeks later. While they felt comfortable trying out lasers on their hair and fingernails, none of them could muster the courage to zap their own skin. The breakthrough came when Srinivasan brought the carcass of his family’s Thanksgiving turkey into the lab on November 27, 1981. There, he etched precise patterns in the cartilage.

After the three IBMers refined their techniques and applied for a patent a New York opthamologist, Stephen Trokel, learned of their work and realized how important the technology could be for eye surgery. The cornea could be reshaped with a laser–improving vision for countless people with nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism. In the summer of 1983, Trokel did exploratory research on the idea with Srinivasan and IBMer Bodil Braren, and, late in 1983, they published a paper on the procedure in a major ophthalmology journal. This paper awakened the ophthalmology community to the potential of their new approach to laser refractive surgery. After  many years of further research and clinical trials, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a commercial laser refractive surgery system in 1995. Since then, more than 25 million people worldwide  have benefited from LASIK and PRK, many of them achieving “eagle-eye” vision–better than 20/20 vision acuity.

Wynne has gone on to play a number of roles at IBM Research. Today, his “day job” includes running an outreach program for getting school kids interested in science and math. But, even though he’s almost 70 years old, he believes he has one more major invention in him. His goal is to develop a concept for using lasers to remove necrotic skin lesions, such as burn eschar, without harming viable skin adjacent and underneath. He calls the technology a “smart scalpel.” He’s looking for a medical organization to collaborate with him on the project–another example of where cross-disciplinary research could lead to a major breakthrough that could help millions of people. “That’s my passion,” Wynne says, “to prove that lasers could produce another paradigm shift in medicine.”

Technorati Tags: IBM, LASIK, National Medal of Technology and Innovation

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

During the past year, we’ve profiled nine exceptional “People for a Smarter Planet” who exemplify the spirit of change, innovation, creativity and curiosity that lie at the core of building a smarter planet. They are inventors and researchers, academics and executives, thought leaders, dreamers, risk-takers, pioneers.

These individuals come from a wide range of fields and possess an array of interests and expertise. What they all have in common is a passion for their work and a commitment to make the world a better place.

They include Ruhong Zhou, whose avian flu research may help prevent a global pandemic; Dave Bartlett, IBM’s smarter buildings guru; Bill Reichert, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with novel advice for entrepreneurs; and sustainability expert Sarah Slaughter.

If you haven’t met them yet, here are nine People for a Smarter Planet you should know.

Technorati Tags: business analytics, cloud, IBM Research, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, smarter analytics, Smarter Industries, Smarter People

Robert Waymouth, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry, Stanford University

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

Robert Waymouth, Ph.D., maintains the sense of awe that he’s had since his earliest days as a chemist, savoring those “marvelous moments where it just takes your breath away, you can’t believe something worked like that.”

Waymouth, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, had one such moment in 2004 when he and his grad students discovered a new way to make molecules using organic catalysts. That breakthrough, followed by years of research with colleague Jim Hedrick at IBM Research in Almaden, Calif., has yielded a process to make environmentally sustainable plastics that could lead to smarter recycling methods, a drastic reduction in plastics pollution and even a safer, more efficient way to administer drugs.

Waymouth and Hedrick’s work represents a major advance in green chemistry (also known as sustainable chemistry), which uses substances and processes designed to reduce or eliminate negative environmental impacts. For their pioneering work, they were recently awarded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Presidential Green Chemistry Award.

“The plastics we use today are truly modern marvels, but the way we’ve produced and disposed of them for the past 50 years is not sustainable,” Waymouth said. “We need to change the way we think about and synthesize the materials we use everyday so we create them in a sustainable way.”

Breakthrough could revolutionize plastic bottle recycling

Waymouth and Hedrick teamed up in 1997 as part of an industry-university partnership between IBM and Stanford, funded by the National Science Foundation. They initially collaborated to make metal-free plastics to coat microelectronics, but their focus quickly grew in scope.

Traditionally, plastics are created using metal catalysts — however, some heavy metals get left in the plastic, contaminating it and impeding recyclability. Waymouth and Hedrick invented a whole new family of organic catalysts to create plastics that have no metals in them at all.

By removing hazardous metals from plastic production, they’ve opened the door to safer end-products that are biodegradable and biocompatible. Because these new materials break down into harmless small molecules, it’s safe to dispose of them in a landfill or use them in the human body.

“This new research provides a strategy for designing materials that can be made in a sustainable way, so after we use them they can be readily recovered, reused and recycled again and again,” Waymouth said.

Redesign is crucial because today’s plastics were developed and commercialized with little thought to their ultimate environmental fate. Recycling has improved, but is more difficult than most people realize. The material commonly used to make water bottles — polyethylene terephthalate (PET) — is generally recycled one time and then the second generation plastic is discarded in a landfill.

Conceivably, Waymouth and Hedrick’s breakthrough will one day make it easier to recycle the 13 billion plastic bottles disposed of globally each year.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“We want to be awesome”

Waymouth and Hedrick have published 80 papers and share ten patents on the design of organic catalysts for polymer chemistry. Meanwhile, as they continue an active research agenda to develop the science of sustainable materials, they’re also focused on demonstrating that their processes and materials are both economically and environmentally sustainable.

“The petrochemical industry has been so successful and it’s so well established that to compete with existing technologies with new approaches you need to be awesome, and that’s what we’re after: We want to be awesome,” Waymouth said.

In the near term, the most likely and practical application of this science will be in biomedicine. For instance, researchers recently designed a polymer that can be used to fight superbugs and drug-resistant bacteria in humans.

In addition, Waymouth’s research offers great promise in the area of drug delivery, where one of the biggest challenges is getting a drug into specific cells. Many cancer drugs, for example, are so potent that they attack cancerous and healthy cells alike.

“The small, biodegradable molecules we’ve developed can transport drugs through cell membranes, straight into the cells or regions they’re targeted for,” Waymouth said.

Transforming how chemistry is practiced and perceived

As exciting as the prospects in plastics and medicine are, for Waymouth they’re steps on the road to an even grander goal.

“My greatest objective is to change the way people think about chemistry and science. So while I’d be delighted if some of our science turned into a practical product, it’s this transformational power of an idea that inspires me,” Waymouth said.

“Fifty years from now I hope people will say that what we’re doing today changed the way polymer chemistry is practiced,” he said. “That’s what drives me.”

Technorati Tags: green chemistry, Hedrick, organic catalyst, PET, plastic bottles, plastics, polyethylene terephthalate, polymers, recycling, water bottles, Waymouth

Dan Pelino, General Manager, Global Healthcare & Life Sciences, IBM

By Dan Pelino

Last week, I had the opportunity to join leaders from all aspects of the healthcare ecosystem at the Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York City. We have all attended conferences like this in the past. We have heard ideas that are aspiring and some of these ideas inspire us to take an action.

What I found different and energizing about this event was the acceleration of the dialogue in creating value beyond the traditional barriers of health and healthcare. No one at the event was satisfied with status quo. The data is overwhelming and we all agree that new business models need to emerge. 

We heard examples of leadership, collaboration and governance that have had a profound impact on populations. We heard the rallying cry that we cannot leave the challenge of healthcare at the doorstep of hospital emergency rooms. We heard that this is a journey – not a one and done appointment.

Symbolic of their off-stage collaboration, the University of Rochester Medical Center and Excellus BlueCross BlueShield came together at the event to discuss the pivotal role that healthcare has played in the city of Rochester’s revitalization. Seven large employers joined forces in an effort to make Rochester one of the healthiest communities in the U.S.

As a result of this collaboration and the commitment to health as a pillar of its economic development, the city now has some of the lowest healthcare and health insurance costs in the country.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It has also become a center of innovation in healthcare and life sciences. The University of Rochester Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation (HSCCI) is home to IBM’s next generation supercomputer – the Blue Gene/Q. The Center for Governmental Research estimates that the project could create 900 jobs in the community and generate $205 million in new research funding over the next 10 years.

These leaders, from industries ranging from academia to healthcare, have demonstrated the powerful impact that a common vision can have on a city and the quality of services that they are able to deliver to their citizens.

This work requires a level of discipline and collaboration to be called out, encouraged and rewarded. We can all learn from Rochester. We must go beyond traditional barriers and relationships that have restricted our ability to deliver outcomes that matter.

We are all in this together and this event reminded me again – leadership matters. We are on the cusp of a tremendous opportunity to completely modernize the face of healthcare as we know it. This move requires leaders that are willing to take action to turn vision into reality. The time is now.

Technorati Tags: Blue Gene/Q, forbes healthcare summit, healthcare, IBM Smarter Planet, Smarter Healthcare, Smarter Planet, University of Rochester, Wegmans