For instance, if a patient is already being treated with prescription medicines and wants to take an over-the-counter medication, he or she would log into the IBM Patient Empowerment System and add the name of the drug to their list of medications. The system immediately crawls through his or her medical data, performs deep analytics, and then issues a warning message with details about a potentially dangerous interaction between one of the drugs they are already taking and the new one.

[See also: IBM, Nuance to apply 'Watson' analytics to healthcare.]

The system also incorporates the patient’s genetic profile that allows it to issue warnings to the patient and prescribing physician if certain dosages or drug combinations are problematic given their personal genetic variations.

Other smart services developed as part of this healthcare portal include socio-medical search and personalized recommendation services. The system maintains a unique dataspace that represents social entities, such as patients and healthcare personnel, and their relationship with medical entities, such as medications, allergies and treatment plans.

The IBM Patient Empowerment System also offers search capabilities and recommendations about patients who suffer from similar problems, potential treatment plans, expert physicians, and more. These features are built on IBM’s Big Data Analytics platform, which can process structured and unstructured data at scale and speed not possible with traditional data warehouse technologies, said officials, allowing the system to discover relations hidden in the data and correlate with external information.