Cleveland Clinic and IBM has inked a five-year agreement to establish a model for a health system transition to value-based care and population health, and to uncover potential standards that could be replicated by providers nationwide. The agreement reflects the parties’ intention to expand the use of IBMs secured cloud, social, mobile and Watson cognitive computing technologies across clinical and administrative operations. The collaboration is also being designed to better capture the value of data and to enhance patient care across the systems’ nine regional hospitals and 18 full-service family health centers.
As the healthcare industry grows increasingly dependent on technology to deliver efficient, high-quality, and affordable care, the new technology implementation is designed to enable efficient analysis of data from EHR, information from administrative claims, and social determinants of health, allowing for both personalized clinical care and broader population-focused management.
For example, data analysis could help predict which diabetes patients are resistant to certain treatments and whether similarities exist within a group of diabetes patients that could help medical providers better tailor patient engagement to address specific needs, such as notifying of recommended treatments or actions to take.
“This initiative with IBM is mutually beneficial and will significantly advance our IT capabilities, which are increasingly important to provide the best care to patients as healthcare becomes more and more technology dependent,” said Toby Cosgrove, M.D., CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic. “With the explosion of data in healthcare, the technology solutions we will develop and implement together could transform our ability to deliver quality, evidence-based care and better respond to the needs of our patients, caregivers and partners.”