IBM joins medical groups in getting into record-mining business

IBM Corp. and a for-profit startup of the American Medical Group Assn. are hoping to reap financial windfalls from mining health data.

Earlier this year, IBM created a new business unit to sell the information technology that academic medical centers need to engage in what IBM calls information-based medicine. That involves integrating a wide variety of health data, including patient records, medical images and genetic information, for the purpose of researching and improving the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, said Michael Svinte, vice president of information medicine.

"It's really using information technology to help achieve personalized health care so that we enter into an environment where patients are really treated as individuals -- leveraging all the information and knowledge that exists about them and how they compare with other folks with similar characteristics," he said.

IBM's Information Based Medicine Unit, which is part of IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, won't slice, dice or have access to patient information. Instead it will provide the technology tools and services that individual academic medical centers need to aggregate, analyze and protect the privacy of their data, Svinte said.

The technology giant also is targeting pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as potential clients. Those companies increasingly are interested in using technology to develop new drugs and identify potential candidates for clinical trials more quickly and efficiently.

IBM estimates that the information-based medicine market will increase from $5.5 billion in 2003 to $8 billion in 2006, Svinte said. The market is a key part of IBM's strategy to grow revenue. "Today as a company we have a handful of key areas that we're investing in, and information-based medicine ... is really one of those areas that we have identified for significant growth as we move forward," Svinte said. "This is a worldwide initiative."

Separately, the AMGA's Anceta LLC plans to begin selling benchmarking data services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies, government entities and employers later this year.

Anceta plans on building a national data warehouse that will let AMGA members mine their data. AMGA members that contribute de-identified data to Anceta will be able to use the data warehouse to analyze and compare their quality, economic and operational performance against groups similar to them, said Jeffrey Hill, Anceta's CEO.

Participating members will have free access to the data warehouse, which AMGA views as a powerful membership recruitment tool. That's because while many large medical groups and health systems AMGA represents have data-mining capabilities, they do not have access to broader and comparative data Anceta can offer them, Hill said.

Both Anceta and IBM say their products eventually will benefit office-based physicians, though neither firm is targeting those doctors as clients.

As medical centers' research leads to better diagnosis and treatment "at some point in the future you can see that ultimately getting down to the practicing physician level," Svinte said.

AMGA and its members will publish the results of their research -- evidence-based guidelines and other benchmarks -- in medical journals, which will help physicians run their practice and deliver better patient care, Hill said.

Anceta is pulling for IBM to do well because many of the large groups and institutions IBM is targeting as clients are members of AMGA, he said. Ten unidentified medical groups are participating in the data warehouse project, and Anceta plans to recruit up to an additional 40 groups during the next five years.

"We're focusing on groups that have the more sophisticated information technology and the greatest breadth and scope of information [already in an electronic format] so that we can best demonstrate the value [of the data warehouse]," Hill said.