ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- At the 2017 Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Orlando, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced several new offerings, collaborators and clients. IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty will deliver the HIMSS17 opening keynote address today from 8:30-10 am ET, broadcast live on www.ibm.com, www.ibm.com/watson/health, and ibm.com/industries/healthcare. Her remarks examine the advent of the Cognitive Era and the implications on the development of new medicines, precision medicine, population health and value-based care.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), approximately 1,600 U.S. hospitals will receive performance bonuses in 2017 for hitting quality benchmarks, while over 1,300 will suffer penalties for missing those targets. Meeting this challenge has put the spotlight on technology that helps healthcare providers, health plans, and self-insured employers manage population health risk and better engage with patients.   

"Healthcare organizations are operating in a complex and fluctuating business environment, one in which the insights they need to succeed can be hidden amidst an avalanche of disparate and siloed data," said Deborah DiSanzo, General Manager of IBM Watson Health. "Watson Health's extensive industry expertise informs how we deploy data, cloud and cognitive computing to help clients make more informed decisions today and understand precisely what their organization should address to achieve their quality care goals and outcomes in a value-based care system."

Value-Based Care Management Solutions

IBM Watson Health is developing the first offerings to integrate the specialized capabilities of Watson Care Manager, Truven Health Analytics, Phytel, and Explorys. The new series of value-based cloud solutions are designed to help enable providers, health plans, and employers to improve the management of healthcare costs and quality by offering stakeholders innovative views of populations, potential risk factors and possible mitigation flags at an individual, group and population level.

The new IBM Watson Health Value-Based Care solutions will over time integrate patient-level data from a variety of sources, including electronic health records (EHR), hospital administrative and clinical databases, claims data and other sources to create a deeper basis for understanding and helping to predict future needs and behaviors. The first applications to be available later this year as part of the solution set include:

• Provider Performance Manager: A quality management solution that will enable healthcare providers to analyze and help project future performance against specific value-based care benchmarks and incentives.
• Engagement Manager: A cognitive analytics solution that tracks individual patient activity and engagement levels, while incorporating hospital-specific process of care data and socio-demographic data to create a risk stratification of an entire patient population.
• Bundled Payments Forecasting and Management: An expanded consulting service and set of new web-based tools designed to help healthcare providers accurately forecast future spending and identify cost centers that could trigger payment penalties.
• Custom Analytics: An enterprise analytics offering that enables health plans and providers to embed the robust analytic content from Truven Health Analytics in their own technology environments.

"We believe that the large scale movement to value-based models for care delivery and reimbursement means that healthcare providers and payers must now adopt different approaches to managing population health risk," said Mike Boswood, General Manager of Value-Based Care, IBM Watson Health. "The value-based care solutions we are announcing today are designed to give hospitals, health plans, and self-insured employers the insights they need to understand how any one clinical or administrative decision can cascade throughout an organization and can potentially have dramatic impacts on both the cost and quality of care."

Watson Drives Value for Providers and Populations

IBM also announced the roster of industry leaders leveraging Watson continues to grow:

Central New York Care Collaborative: IBM will work with CNYCC to create a population health platform, intended to connect 2,000 care providers across six counties, and with the goal to reduce costs in the Medicaid system by decreasing the amount of avoidable hospital stays by 25% over the course of the project. The population health platform will integrate IBM Watson Care Manager with broader Watson Health offerings and run on the IBM Cloud.

Atrius Health: The innovative non-profit health system has entered into a collaboration with IBM Watson Health to conduct research into a cloud-based service designed to improve the physician-patient experience. By providing a holistic view of the multiple influences on an individual's health, including social determinants, Watson Cognitive Insights could be designed to support shared decision making between physicians and patients.

The Watson Health medical imaging collaborative has added eight new members, bringing the total number to 24 worldwide. Members of the collaborative helped IBM develop/validate Watson Clinical Imaging Review, the first cognitive offering from IBM. It is intended to help providers ensure patients get the care they need. Using Watson Clinical Imaging Review, hospital administrators may identify cases where follow up care is warranted and assure EMR information is complete.

IBM and Best Doctors Make Watson Commercially Available as an Employee Health Benefit: the two companies today announced that Watson's oncology prowess is now available as an employee health benefit for companies that want to help members of their workforce battling cancer. Through the Best Doctors network of expert clinical consultation providers, employees will have access to Watson's suite of oncology offerings for insights on cancer treatment options, ranging from standard treatment to clinical trials to precision medicine. The impactful collaboration of Best Doctors and Watson is expected to help companies identify significant cost savings as a result of these efforts.

HIMSS17 is February 19-23 at the Orange County Convention Center. Visit IBM Watson Health (booth #1809); Merge, an IBM Company (booth #1712); and Truven Health Analytics, an IBM Company (booth #4861). Go online to learn about IBM Watson Health at HIMSS17 and follow IBM's Watson Health's social media channels #IBMHealthcare, #WatsonHealth, and #HIMSS17 for on-site activity updates, times and locations, as well as timely insights from the Watson Health ecosystem.

About IBM Watson Health
Watson is the first commercially available cognitive computing capability representing a new era in computing. The system, delivered through the cloud, analyzes high volumes of data, understands complex questions posed in natural language, and proposes evidence-based answers. Watson continuously learns, gaining in value and knowledge over time, from previous interactions. In April 2015, the company launched IBM Watson Health and the Watson Health Core cloud platform (now Watson Platform for Health). The new unit will help improve the ability of doctors, researchers and insurers to innovate by surfacing insights from the massive amount of personal health data being created and shared daily. The Watson Platform for Health can mask patient identities and allow for information to be shared and combined with a dynamic and constantly growing aggregated view of clinical, research and social health data. For more information on IBM Watson, visit: ibm.com/watson. For more information on IBM Watson Health, visit: ibm.com/watsonhealth.

Media Contact:
Ariana Nikitas
312-533-3437
anikitas@us.ibm.com

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SOURCE IBM

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