Monday, March 3, 2008

IBM Unveils the Next Generation of Enterprise Health Analytics

ORLANDO, FL – February 25, 2008 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced at HIMSS®08 a ground-breaking, comprehensive portfolio of health analytics solutions for healthcare providers. IBM’s proven Enterprise Health Analytics harness the power of massive information generated by today’s healthcare industry by converting it into new, data-driven intelligence. This rich source of clinical and business insight can bring strategic differentiation to providers by giving them unprecedented knowledge about their operations, patients, and effectively all aspects of their businesses.

IBM's Enterprise Health Analytics are a complete suite of services, infrastructure, and tools that can be tailored to the needs of any client-- from entry level, off-the-shelf analytics capabilities to custom-built data warehouses for academic and research settings. The solutions fill a significant void in data integration and intelligent analyses that currently poses a major barrier to trans-formation in the Healthcare Industry.

According to Dan Pelino, General Manager, IBM Global Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry, we have witnessed an explosion of data and complexity in the healthcare industry over the past two decades. Hospitals moved to adopt Electronic Medical Records. Technology vendors delivered proprietary applications that captured and integrated discrete data to improve clinical processes. This meets an urgent need to convert discrete data in ways that meet growing demands from employers, payers, consumers and governments to publicly report quality, clinical outcomes, cost of care and compliance to standards.

At present, most major provider organizations have adopted a variety of proprietary, disparate systems designed and optimized for transactional performance. These departmental and transactional systems inhibit providers from having an enterprise view and the ability to quickly respond to changes in the market, such as pay-for-performance and quality reporting. What they require is an integrated system that enables data aggregation and analysis, the results of which are applied in clinical and business settings to dramatically improve quality outcomes.

In such a dynamic environment, IBM’s Enterprise Health Analytics solutions can help meet providers’ needs and generate increased competitiveness by helping them leverage their data-rich environments, even where disparate systems exist, transforming the data into intelligent, high-value clinical, business and research information. IBM can also leverage its strategic partnerships; its leadership in business intelligence in multiple industries; its leadership in high-performance and energy-efficient computing; and the movement to open standards and architectures (SOA) to help provider clients easily and affordably address the dynamics of changing business priorities.


IBM’s Enterprise Health Analytics solutions will help providers:
• Efficiently report, trend and analyze key organizational, financial and clinical metrics to improve reporting compliance, competitively participate in pay-for-performance programs, and drive performance improvement
• Access information to manage and report the progression and impact of chronic diseases such as diabetes or stroke within a system, region or market
• Predict high-risk populations and begin early interventions for wellness management
• View and analyze aggregated, specific data sets by specific populations for cohort management, disease registries, clinical guidelines, and patient safety
• Prepare for evidence-based medicine, leading to the practice of personalized medicine.


IBM’s Enterprise Health Analytics transforms information through a simplified, streamlined and “intelligent” process that successfully integrates and aggregates disparate data from multiple sources for practical use. Data is transformed through a Business Intelligence Reference Architecture that transforms disparate data, making it available in a timely manner for analysis that can solve specific clinical, business and research problems.

Further, IBM’s Enterprise Health Analytics solutions are enabled by an agile, resilient and scalable infrastructure that informs and guides clients through role-based embedded intelligence. This allows providers to predict market conditions and growth opportunities, integrate processes across their extended enterprises, and ensures scalability and the ability to adapt efficiently and deliver quickly in a rapidly changing environment.

Additionally, the recent acquisition by IBM of Cognos will dramatically increase capabilities available for providers in the area of health analytics, with early focus on performance management followed by increasing movement towards deeper clinical analytics.

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