IBM Provides Big Data Analytics Tool to Healthcare Org; Craig Rhinehart Comments

IBM has supplied a North Carolina-based nonprofit healthcare organization with an analytics platform to manage and interpret structured and unstructured medical data.

UNC Health Care uses IBM Smarter Care technology to access registration forms, discharge summaries, physician notes and other documents that can help clinicians gain insight into factors affecting patient health, IBM said Friday.

According to the company, the tool uses a similar natural language process to the Watson computer.

“It can reveal trends, patterns and deviations while predicting the probability of outcomes so that we can make decisions in minutes versus weeks or months,” said Dr. Carlton Moore, UNCHC associate professor of medicine.

Craig Rhinehart, IBM director of enterprise content management strategy, said the company aims for customers to improve care quality and lower costs by using technology.

UNCHC intends for the system to extract cancer screening reports, identify readmission predictors and simplify health information that patients can access electronically.

The healthcare organization previously used IBM’s Content Analytics platform to mine data from its physician quality reporting system.