IBM announced plans Thursday to enlist some of its leading scientists and technologists to help medical practitioners and payers provide high-quality, evidence-based care to patients.

As part of the $100 million, three-year initiative, IBM is hiring doctors to work alongside its researchers to develop new technologies, scientific advancements and business processes for healthcare and insurance providers.

The initiative will draw on IBM's leadership in systems integration, services research, cloud computing, analytics and emerging scientific areas such as nanomedicine and computational biology in order to drive innovations that empower practitioners to focus their efforts on patient care, executives say.

More than 100 researchers – across IBM’s nine worldwide labs and its collaboratories in Melbourne and Taipei – are contributing to these efforts. The company also expects to hire several physicians, clinicians, nurses, engineers, economists and social scientists.

Additionally, it will seek new research collaborations with businesses, governments and universities.

With the project, IBM will focus its research on three areas:

• Evidence generation, which uses scientific methods to use raw health data to help develop effective treatment methods, and then delivering it in a context-dependent and personalized way at the point of care;
• Improving service quality through simplifying the healthcare delivery process; and
• New incentives and models to shift the healthcare system to one that rewards based on patient outcomes rather than only treatment and volume of care.

Privacy and security of patient data and compliance with current healthcare regulations will also be addressed throughout the new research initiative.

“Improving the quality of healthcare requires more than just digitizing health data,” said Chalapathy Neti, global lead, healthcare transformation at IBM Research. “In fact the proliferation of diagnostics technology has in many ways added another layer of complexity, making it more difficult to gain valuable insights for patient care. Enabling greater coordination between care providers and transforming data into clinical decision intelligence could improve patient outcomes and help lower costs of healthcare today.”

IBM researchers across the globe are collaborating on a variety of efforts to help bring more a more evidence-based approach to patient care. Current research efforts include:

• Computer scientists working with cardiologists to create a system that helps identify patterns in symptoms and characteristics across a patient set
• Researchers working with the European HYPERGENES consortium to identify the genetic variations responsible for hypertension and associated organ damage
• Scientists and mathematicians using data mining, information management and advanced analytics to build systems to better understand and address adverse drug reactions and interactions
• Researchers combining expertise in nanotechnology and biology to develop new applications for personalized medicine such as a nanopore-based technology that could read and sequence human DNA quickly and efficiently for more personalized diagnosis and treatment

For payers
This effort will also see IBM collaborating with National Account Service Company (NASCO) to help its benefits and operations teams make changes to claim processing rules quickly and accurately in response to rapidly evolving regulations, policies and patient coverage rules that regularly occur with healthcare benefit plans.

The collaboration will enable plan traceability by examining existing benefit code and rules and mapping them back to industry concepts and constructs. The team created a technology that translates the different sequences of code into English, analyzes the sequences, consolidates similar functions into groups, and displays the translated code using several data visualization approaches.

Using IBM's expertise in analyzing complex, large-scale IT systems, the scientists have provided NASCO with a way to improve claims payment research while increasing the flexibility necessary to efficiently respond to new or changing healthcare regulatory and market requirements.

Via analytics and mathematical optimization techniques, company researchers are also exploring payment models based on best practices and positive outcomes at the patient level, large-scale analysis of wellness at a population level and more.

These efforts could accelerate the shift of the current healthcare system from a fee-for-service model to one that rewards disease prevention and wellness.