IBM has announced the launch of its Health Analytics Solution Center in Dallas, to be followed by centres in Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, New York City, London and Washington DC. [It’s a vacuous name – ‘solution’ is such hackneyed jargon – but a fantastic development.] Its purpose is to “address the growing demand for advanced analytics to help hospitals and medical staff improve decision-making and provide higher quality care [and will] be used to understand how patients use medical services and explore patterns of potentially unnecessary care and opportunities for improving patient safety or quality of care. In the IBM Health Analytics Center, [sic] a number of key innovations in health IT to help clients are available including the IBM Health Integration Framework, enterprise health analytics, health payer analytics, data integration, patient portals, remote patient monitoring, preventative care and Patient Centered Medical Home technologies. [My emphasis, Steve]
It’s going to be big. “As part of this initiative, IBM expects to retrain or hire as many as 4,000 new analytics consultants and professionals globally.” [See comments] IBM press release.
Only one IBM Health Analytics Centre, in Dallas?
My interpretation of this press release is that it is only the Dallas centre which will focus on Health, the others have a different industry focus (for example the London one is for Financial risk management). Also the number of Health-specific Analytics consultants appears to be 100, the 4,000 refers to all the industry centres.
IBM Health Analytics Center
David, You are right. Thanks for the more careful reading of the press release.
This is still a very significant step in the IBM/GE strategy, though. First their technology acquisitions, then their ‘partnership’, now the organisation of a facility to process, analyse and report the data… Next? Even more aggressive marketing? And GE’s next move?