ARMONK, NY – IBM is lending its considerable IT expertise to University of North Carolina Health Care to help speed the development of new treatments for diseases like diabetes, cystic fibrosis and cancer.

UNCHC is using IBM’s Health Integration Framework, as well as InfoSphere and WebSphere software, to create the Carolina Data Warehouse for Health, a huge repository of data that researchers will use to analyze patient data, research trends in symptoms and develop new treatments.

‘With the deployment of the Carolina Data Warehouse for Health, we have been able to increase the timelines of the information available to our researchers, staff and physicians,” said Donald Spencer, MD, associate director of medical informatics for UNC Health Care. “Because the system can also support general queries that relate to the diagnosis and treatment of a wide array of patients, we are no able to make more intelligent decisions leading to improved patient care.”

To Ed Macko, IBM’s director of healthcare and life science solutions, the data warehouse is a logical progression. After years of collectiong data electronically in disparate silos, IT companies like IBM are now developing data mining technologies to put that data to use.

“One of the key focuses in healthcare is health analytics,” he said. “People have been collecting this information for years, and now they want to look at that data. They just needed to know what they want to do with it.”

The IBM-UNCHC collaboration is – for now – focused on three subject areas: Cohort Selection, designed for researchers needed de-identified data for studies, grants and clinical trial recruitment; Diabetes Data Mart, designed for clinicians and analysts seeking data on diabetes for disease management, performance reporting and analysis; and Inpatient Data mart, designed for hospital analysts and the hospital’s quality improvement office to support performance improvement efforts, core measures reporting and hospital patient population studies and anlysis.

Macko said IBM has worked with other healthcare providers, like the Mayo Clinic and New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, to create specific analytics programs. And he sees a project like that between IBM and UNCHC expanding to cover other fields, as well as other institutions.

The ultimate goal, he said, is to use that data to support evidence-based healthcare.
“Now that they have the platform, expansion is unlimited,” he said. “Health analytics is a combination of products coordinated to answer a specific task – and there are plenty of tasks. This is where healthcare is going.”