After announcing plans to acquire open source software provider Red Hat this week, IBM now plans to move its Watson Health cognitive services to a hybrid cloud model.
Watson, the IBM supercomputer that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze natural language and perform data analytics, has been used to identify medical data sources, generate hypotheses, recommend patient treatments to physicians or match patients to clinical trials.
The Veterans Administration has also used Watson for genomics as part of its precision oncology program, which primarily looks for possible new treatments for stage 4 cancer patients who have exhausted other options.
The artificial intelligence engine has been used to comb through massive data stores from published medical literature, patient medical records and physician notes to help researchers identify new uses for drugs; connect patients to clinical drug trials; and offer up potential treatment options based on previous outcomes of patients with similar heath profiles.
The Watson Health service has been primarily offered by setting up on-premise services in hospitals and other healthcare and research facilities that are closely monitored by IBM staff.
Better healthcare from a hybrid cloud?
"It has become apparent to us that the right answer for healthcare, like so many other industries, is a hybrid cloud because some institutions want their data on [premise] and yet they want to be able to hook to other data sets, public clouds and do big time AI and analytics on the public side," said John Kelly, who took over the IBM Watson Health division last week.
The buyout of Red Hat will become integral to the IBM's hybrid cloud strategy, Kelly said, as many of its clients' private clouds run on Red Hat Linux, as do public clouds, like that offered by IBM. Red Hat brings with it software connect those the two and enable data to be passed back and forth, Kelly said.
"We became convinced that this hybrid model, where you can move data seamlessly back and forth, where you can move analytics and AI seamlessly back and forth, is the right answer. And our clients are telling us that's the right answer," Kelly said.
Offering a hybrid cloud to healthcare and insurance provider customers of Watson Health will also reduce the need for IBM onsite services, since Watson's AI engine will be exposed through different user interfaces, Kelly said.
IBM will provide the services to go to user sites and move their data to a private cloud, connect them to IBM's public cloud, and then move that data to a HIPAA-compliant cloud for healthcare use.
Cynthia Burghard, a research director for IDC Health Insights, said "in theory" the more flexibility organizations have as to where they house their workloads, the better it is for them.
"What is confusing to me is that as far as I know the analytic applications that IBM has for healthcare payers and providers are on premise and have not been re-architected for the cloud, so I don't really know what IBM is moving to a cloud infrastructure," Burghard said.
An IBM spokesman said IBM's Watson Health service has 11,000 clinical measures that are part of it analytics suite. Some are on-premise and others are on IBM's cloud, depending on the client's preference and the market segment (such as payers, government agencies, hospital systems, for instance). Traditionally, however, most of those services did begin on premise, he said.
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Watson, the IBM supercomputer that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze natural language and perform data analytics, has been used to identify medical data sources, generate hypotheses, recommend patient treatments to physicians or match patients to clinical trials.
The Veterans Administration has also used Watson for genomics as part of its precision oncology program, which primarily looks for possible new treatments for stage 4 cancer patients who have exhausted other options.
The artificial intelligence engine has been used to comb through massive data stores from published medical literature, patient medical records and physician notes to help researchers identify new uses for drugs; connect patients to clinical drug trials; and offer up potential treatment options based on previous outcomes of patients with similar heath profiles.
The Watson Health service has been primarily offered by setting up on-premise services in hospitals and other healthcare and research facilities that are closely monitored by IBM staff.
Better healthcare from a hybrid cloud?
"It has become apparent to us that the right answer for healthcare, like so many other industries, is a hybrid cloud because some institutions want their data on [premise] and yet they want to be able to hook to other data sets, public clouds and do big time AI and analytics on the public side," said John Kelly, who took over the IBM Watson Health division last week.
The buyout of Red Hat will become integral to the IBM's hybrid cloud strategy, Kelly said, as many of its clients' private clouds run on Red Hat Linux, as do public clouds, like that offered by IBM. Red Hat brings with it software connect those the two and enable data to be passed back and forth, Kelly said.
"We became convinced that this hybrid model, where you can move data seamlessly back and forth, where you can move analytics and AI seamlessly back and forth, is the right answer. And our clients are telling us that's the right answer," Kelly said.
Offering a hybrid cloud to healthcare and insurance provider customers of Watson Health will also reduce the need for IBM onsite services, since Watson's AI engine will be exposed through different user interfaces, Kelly said.
IBM will provide the services to go to user sites and move their data to a private cloud, connect them to IBM's public cloud, and then move that data to a HIPAA-compliant cloud for healthcare use.
Cynthia Burghard, a research director for IDC Health Insights, said "in theory" the more flexibility organizations have as to where they house their workloads, the better it is for them.
"What is confusing to me is that as far as I know the analytic applications that IBM has for healthcare payers and providers are on premise and have not been re-architected for the cloud, so I don't really know what IBM is moving to a cloud infrastructure," Burghard said.
An IBM spokesman said IBM's Watson Health service has 11,000 clinical measures that are part of it analytics suite. Some are on-premise and others are on IBM's cloud, depending on the client's preference and the market segment (such as payers, government agencies, hospital systems, for instance). Traditionally, however, most of those services did begin on premise, he said.
http://www.computerworld.in
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