IBM Unveils the Next Generation of Enterprise Health Analytics

Gives Healthcare Health Systems Unprecedented Strategic Insight and Strengthens Competitive Differentiation



ORLANDO, FL .-IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced at HIMSS®08 a ground-breaking, comprehensive portfolio of health analytics solutions for health systems. 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 health systems 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 transformation in the Healthcare 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. And the demand for clinical and departmental systems accelerated,” said Dan Pelino, General Manager, IBM Global Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry. “IBM’s Enterprise Health Analytics solutions meet health systems’ urgent need to convert this discrete data in ways that meet growing demands from employers, health benefits companies, consumers and governments to publicly report quality, clinical outcomes, cost of care and compliance to standards.”

At present, most major health-system organizations have adopted a variety of proprietary, disparate processes designed and optimized for transactional performance. These departmental and transactional systems inhibit health systems 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 health systems’ 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 health systems:

* 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 health systems 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 health systems in the area of health analytics, with early focus on performance management followed by increasing movement towards deeper clinical analytics.

As confirmed by Gartner’s Business Information Magic Quadrant, IBM is the world’s leading and largest business-information system integrator, operating on all continents with business consultants in more than 25 countries and more than 2,300 skilled resources worldwide. Moreover, IBM has provided parallel strategic services for clients in 17 other target industries.