IBM Watson Health has teamed up with the American Diabetes Association (ADA) to build a first-of-its-kind ‘diabetes advisor’ for patients and caregivers.
The collaboration will marry IBM’s Watson supercomputer with the vast repository of clinical and research data held by the ADA.
The partners hope to develop tools that will help diabetes patients, carers and healthcare professionals make clinical, research and lifestyle decisions.
The ADA’s CEO Kevin Hagan said: “For more than 75 years, the American Diabetes Association has promoted a data-driven approach to clinical care and disease management because we know it can significantly improve peoples’ lives while also reducing health care costs.
“By combining the Association’s enormous body of valuable data with Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities, we will empower people living with diabetes, clinicians and researchers with better data and better insights, which ultimately can lead to better outcomes.”
The plans include several potential service offerings, including a cognitive diabetes database for use by healthcare providers and a cloud-based data and insights service for researchers.
Announcing the tie-up at the ADA’s annual scientific meeting earlier this month, IBM and the ADA also outlined their plans for a developer challenge to produce new ‘cognitive’ apps for the prevention and management of diabetes.
Its purpose is to advance the use of technology to promote health and to ultimately help improve the lives of those living with diabetes or prediabetes.
When it comes to the former, at least 415 million people around the world known to be living with diabetes and it’s one of the most common and costly chronic diseases.
Kyu Rhee, IBM Watson Health’s chief health officer, said: “As the science of diabetes advances, big data presents a tremendous opportunity in diabetes care and prevention. But patients, caregivers and healthcare providers need access to cognitive tools that can help them translate that big data into action.
“Our collective goal [with the developer challenge] is to provide the motivation, the tools and the insights to transform clinical care, self-management and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.”
IBM has been ramping up its health ambitions in in the last year, signing a diabetes care deal with Novo Nordisk and forming a psychiatric data-based digital health company with Otsuka.
