Today the line that divides health care and information technology is becoming very thin. Take, for example, the likes of Apple, Google, and now IBM that are dipping their feet in the world of wellness.
While Google is trying to build huge technologies for better health, Apple, on the other hand, tries to give something more common: apps and kits that can collect health information, which can then be used by many providers such as hospitals and insurers.
But there's a potential problem. How does one make sense of all the information that's being collected? This is where IBM comes in.
IBM has been one of the champions of computing and IT analysis, so it makes perfect sense that it acquired Phytel and Eplorys, which develop software for medical data. It has also established partnerships with Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson, and now Apple.
Through its new Watson Health initiative, gathering and interpreting millions of health data will be easier.
Watson is a cloud-based service offered by IBM, and it should work with both HealthKit and ResearchKit. These are not apps but frameworks in which many Apple-running health-care-related applications are being built to make it easier for developers to relate or sync these to one another.
What IBM does, through Watson, is to provide a place where the data collected by various apps can be stored securely and conveniently in the cloud. This way, they can be accessed anytime and anywhere without having to fear data loss and theft.
IBM's capabilities also extend to big data analytics, which can be used by health care in variety of ways including spotting health and disease trends. Future apps can also be built around these aggregated data.
Nevertheless, some are apprehensive of the partnership, citing possible data mining and inappropriate advertising as some of the potential problems.