IBM Watson Health is making a 10-year, $50 million investment in research collaborations with Brigham and Women’s Hospital — the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School — and Vanderbilt University Medical Center to advance the science of artificial intelligence (AI) and its application to public health issues.
Initial areas of study for the collaborations are expected to include the use of AI to improve the utility of electronic health records (EHRs) and claims data to address significant public health issues such as patient safety, precision medicine and health equity. The research will also explore physician and patient user experience and interactions with AI technologies.
In 2017, IBM announced its plans to make a 10-year, $240 million investment to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab in partnership with MIT. The lab is carrying out fundamental AI research and seeking to propel scientific breakthroughs that unlock the potential of AI. That lab is employing more than 100 AI scientists, professors, and students to pursue joint research at IBM's Research Lab in Cambridge, Mass.— co-located with the IBM Watson Health and IBM Security headquarters in Kendall Square — and on the neighboring MIT campus.
The two new collaborations will be a joint effort among IBM Watson Health’s newly appointed vice president and chief science officer, Gretchen Purcell Jackson, M.D., Ph.D., David Bates, M.D., M.S., chief of general internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Kevin Johnson, M.D., M.S., chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and Gordon Bernard, M.D., Executive Vice President for Research.
“We all know that the future of health belongs to AI, but today health around the globe is siloed and not actionable, making timely insights difficult to obtain,” said Bates in a prepared statement. “Through AI, we have an opportunity to do better, and our hope is to find new ways through science and partnerships with industry leaders like Watson Health to unlock the full potential of AI to improve the utility of the EHR and claims data to address major public health issues like patient safety.”
IBM says Watson AI technology is supporting cancer care in more than 310 hospitals and health organizations. The company also unveiled a range of new AI solutions at HIMSS, showcasing how the technology is being integrated across its range of provider- and payer-focused products, with a focus on capabilities it acquired from Truven Health Analytics, Phytel and Explorys.
