IBM joins medical groups in getting into record-mining business

The computer giant and a medical group society go after a so-called information-based medicine market that IBM says will be at $8 billion in a few years.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. March 8, 2004.

IBM Corp. and a for-profit startup of the American Medical Group Assn. are hoping to reap financial windfalls from mining health data.

Earlier this year, IBM created a new business unit to sell the information technology that academic medical centers need to engage in what IBM calls information-based medicine. That involves integrating a wide variety of health data, including patient records, medical images and genetic information, for the purpose of researching and improving the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, said Michael Svinte, vice president of information medicine.

"It's really using information technology to help achieve personalized health care so that we enter into an environment where patients are really treated as individuals -- leveraging all the information and knowledge that exists about them and how they compare with other folks with similar characteristics," he said.

IBM's Information Based Medicine Unit, which is part of IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, won't slice, dice or have access to patient information. Instead it will provide the technology tools and services that individual academic medical centers need to aggregate, analyze and protect the privacy of their data, Svinte said.

The technology giant also is targeting pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as potential clients. Those companies increasingly are interested in using technology to develop new drugs and identify potential candidates for clinical trials more quickly and efficiently.