IBM introduce Watson Health Cloud on Tuesday as a new platform for doctors, researchers, and insurance companies to securely store health-related data. The WHC into Apple's HealthKit and ResearchKit platforms for data collection from a health and fitness tracking devices.
IBM, Apple team up for new health record platform
IBM said WHC will make it easier to collect medical data then reference that information in a secure and meaningful way. IBM said in a statement,
The future of health is all about the individual. With the increasing prevalence of personal fitness trackers, connected medical devices, implantables and other sensors that collect real-time information, the average person is likely to generate more than one million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime.
For doctors and researchers, Watson Health Cloud will give them powerful analytic tools for processing the collected information, which ultimately should help identify patient issues earlier. For insurance companies, the data will give them a more complete overview of their customer's overall health.
"IBM and Apple will expand their ground-breaking partnership to apply cloud services and analytics to HealthKit and ResearchKit, and iOS devices," IBM said. "IBM will provide a secure research capability on the Watson Health Cloud platform, anonymizing personal data to allow researchers to easily store, aggregate and model information collected from iOS users who opt-in contribute personal data to medical research."
Apple and IBM formed a partnership last year to develop mobile apps and iOS-optimized cloud services for the enterprise market. IBM is also selling iPads to its enterprise customers, giving Apple a presence in the market without having to overcome it's history of on again/off again support for big businesses.
The two companies have now expanded that partnership to include health-related services, which gives Apple a deeper reach into the health and medical market.