IBM Offers Software to Avert Public Health Crises

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IBM on Monday will unveil software it developed in coordination with U.S. health agencies and private hospitals that makes it easier for health care workers to exchange clinical data in a medical crisis.

The software, developed as a response to the anthrax attacks in Washington and other U.S. cities in 2002, is designed to vacuum up data from a range of conflicting databases while ensuring patient privacy in the event of a flu outbreak or the spread of tainted food. It can also track long-term health problems such as diabetes or detect adverse drug interactions in patients.

IBM will also announce on Monday, that Canada’s government has purchased the software to conduct a pilot on an early warning and response system for biological threats in Winnipeg.

The new software, known as Health care Collaborative Network (HCN), is designed for use by local or regional medical communities, IBM said.

It helps public and private health organizations to tap into national electronic networks that can alert them to unusual medical patterns; identify the origin or spread of any problems, and target solutions.

“IBM is applying technology to change the way things get done instead of just selling another piece of technology,” James Rinaldi, chief information officer for the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, said in an interview.

Medical groups led by New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee, and Wishard Memorial Hospital in Indiana have tested and validated the software, IBM said.

The FDA, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have participated in the field trials and stand to benefit from the increased flow of real-time medical data to help them track problems.

Rinaldi said the IBM software can be used to correlate what are typically discreet actions by doctors, pharmacies and hospitals.

“The doctor knows what the patient should be prescribed. The pharmacy knows what was prescribed. The hospital knows how a patient is responding,” he said.

Jim Gabler, an analyst with Gartner Inc. said finding patterns in public health data remains a fairly manual process, despite heavy investments over the years in health care information technology.

He estimated as much as two years can elapse between recording of medical information and its availability for researchers. “This sort of software is just going to speed that up,” he said.

Dr. Claire Broome, senior advisor to the director of the CDC for integrated house information systems, said much medical data sits in non-standard formats, making it hard to compare quickly.

While U.S. medical privacy laws, including HIPPA, allow controlled sharing of patient data in situations of overriding public health concern, the lack of systems able to talk to one another limits this.

“It’s a question of what information is actually available in a form that is shareable,” Broome said. IBM’s software is just one part of a solution to this broad problem, she noted.

Health care Collaborative Network builds on IBM’s expertise in creating middleware, software that acts as a bridging system between different conflicting computer systems. IBM plans to provide the software to medical organizations through its business consulting arm.

The software evolved from so-called “interface engines” developed in the 1980s to share disparate information within a single organization such as a hospital system. IBM subsequently acquired one of the companies that developed an interface engine.

HCN goes several steps further by allowing different organizations to collaborate, Gabler said. 

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