IBM’s “Smarter Planet” initiative is far-reaching in scope, covering a large number of verticals across the public and private sector. One critical area for the company is healthcare, but as one might imagine, given the complex regulatory environment for patient data, producing solutions—not to mention finding a swelling, eager audience for them—is a tall order.

As the company explains, albeit generally, in its mini-mission statement on healthcare as a focus, the “smarter approach to healthcare is one that uses information to create real insight into patient care” and that as part of this insight, providing “holistic views” of patient data is key.

This year IBM has made a number of advances to improve the delivery of health information via the use of internal private clouds and partnerships aimed at creating software that can handle the complex data and security requirements. For instance, back in August they partnered with ActiveHealth, a subsidiary of Aetna, to deliver a cloud-based, on-demand clinical decision support suite called the “Collaborative Care Solution.”  

One of IBM’s most recent forays into private clouds for healthcare is with their newly-announced contract with McGill University Health Center in Montreal, Canada. For this, the company is providing a private storage cloud to securely store increasing amounts of data.  According to an article in the Montreal Gazette on the topic, “the MUHC estimates that over the next five years clinical images and electronic files will consume more than 500 terabytes of data—all of which must be available for clinicians’ access 24/7.”

This cloud would, in effect, allow the hospital system to consolidate their disparate storage resources to provide on-demand access for clinicians without tying them to particular locations.

IBM’s VP for the healthcare segment, Barry Burk, noted that “the cloud computing model is particularly applicable to healthcare applications because of the volume of dynamic and diverse sources for information.” He also states that making use of the cloud allows hospitals across the system to share information and with IBM’s support, in a secure manner—a critical issue when dealing with life sciences data, whether personal health-related or otherwise. Burk went on to explain that, “these flexible networks will be scalable in integrating and sharing services and data, which will help reduce costs.”
 

Full story at Montreal Gazette