Data Analytics

IBM’s Watson Offers Expanded Healthcare Services

By expanding services, the company hopes to increase healthcare provider cloud adoption to what’s predicted to soon be a $10 billion industry.

Juliet Van Wagenen

Juliet is the senior web editor for BizTech and HealthTech magazines. In her six years as a journalist she has covered everything from aerospace to indie music reviews — but she is unfailingly partial to covering technology.

Aiming build a platform that will allow healthcare executives to harness the power of Big Data, IBM has introduced expanded capabilities for its Watson Platform for Health Cloud and for its cognitive computing healthcare unit, Watson Health Consulting Services. The new initiatives were unveiled at this week’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference in Orlando, Fla.

The new offerings to Watson Health Cloud aim to bolster security and include enhancements to the HIPAA-enabled Data Platform as a Service, a new “good practices” edition of the platform (which IMB calls GxP), and new data center locations, according to an IBM press release.

“As our clients look to accelerate the digitization of business processes, unlock new value from their health data and infuse new intelligence to transform their enterprise, they need a cloud platform that is built to specifically address the unique needs of the healthcare and life sciences industry," said IBM Global Managing Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences Lori Steele in the statement.

These changes aim to increase the speed of cloud adoption in the healthcare industry, which has previously been slow to migrate data due to concerns about security, regulations and compliance, according to IBM. Global adoption for cloud services in healthcare are predicted to skyrocket: The market was $3.7 billion in 2015 but is expected to hit nearly $10 billion in 2020, according to market research firm Markets and Markets.