IBM starts information-based medicine unit

IBM has started a business unit focused on information-based medicine in its life sciences division with the aim of helping customers integrate healh care data, including research, genetic tests, patient medical records, clinical trials records and medical images.

Operating as of Monday, the global unit is headed by Vice President Mike Svinte, but IBM has not yet determined how many people will work under him. Svinte declined to say how much money IBM is investing in the information-based medicine unit, though he did refer to the investment as “significant.”

Information-based medicine uses IT to manage medical data from various sources, allowing integration of those sources as well as analysis and mining of data. The objective is to pull together the information so that researchers and doctors have better access to more data with the goal of better diagnoses and treatments, as well as drug development.

The unit will work with IBM partners that, for instance, offer life sciences applications for use with IBM software, including its middleware. Svinte offered as a partnership example IBM’s work with Decode Genetics, which identifies the genetic causes of common diseases and develops drugs and diagnostic tools to fight those diseases. Decode has amassed enormous amounts of genetic, genealogical and medical information on people in Iceland, where it is located. The two have paired to offer tools for analysis and data mining.

“What we see happening is the convergence between life sciences, health care and IT,” Svinte said. “The thought is that convergence really has the ability to change the way health care is delivered, to change the diagnosis and treatment, certainly.”

Integrating data could lead to better treatment options by providing doctors with access to up-to-date medical research, medical images and other information that could be analyzed and compared with medical records of individual patients, for example. In that vein, IBM and the University of California, San Francisco, have a three-year project linking clinical information and research findings related to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders.

Although IBM is already involved in projects that will be under the auspices of the information-based medicine unit, existing customers will find the start of that unit is “transparent” to them, Svinte said.

The field of information-based medicine is so new that a successful business model has not yet been clearly defined and that could be a challenge IBM faces as it attempts to take a lead role, said Eric Brown, a vice president at research firm Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A key question is who will pay for such data integration systems. “Everyone participates, so who owns it,” Brown said. “What’s the business model for these going forward?”

Svinte contends that IBM does not have true competition in this market because while various companies offer “piece parts” no one is looking at the overall needs or has the muscle to provide all of the parts that are needed to create an information-based system for medical care. Brown, who hadn’t been briefed by IBM on the new unit, said that IBM has the wherewithal to lead the way in creating a workable business model for medical data integration.

“I think IBM is a good fit here,” he said. “There’s plenty of opportunities for IBM to turn a good success here into a demonstration that they can provide the clinical data repositories within a large network, which is a hot market right now.”