IBM brings global healthcare initiative to the Middle East

The initiative will include the hiring of healthcare specialists, solutions development, research and development projects, IBM Business Partner collaborations, and other programs.

In December 2003, IBM Middle East launched a series of regional seminars for healthcare professionals to spread awareness of its advanced healthcare technologies. The company also addressed some of the fundamental challenges of healthcare information management at the annual Arab Health 2004 conference including issues such as providing more care with limited resources, minimising medical errors, speeding up the diagnosis process and sharing important data so that health professionals can make informed business and clinical decisions quickly and easily.

"The healthcare industry in the Middle East is under tremendous pressure to address patient safety, quality of care and cost issues. They need advanced technologies that can help them manage costs, reduce medical errors, and deliver better patient care," said Samer Shaar, General Manager of IBM Middle East, Pakistan and Egypt. "IBM is deeply committed to developing the on-demand solutions and offering the consulting expertise and business insights that can help the region's healthcare sector transform. Working closely with our business partners, we can help bring catalytic change and help the industry deliver on the promise of better patient care."

The highlights of the global announcement include new healthcare solutions designed to deliver information-based medicine that bring safer, more efficient approaches to health care; formation of the IBM Centre for Healthcare Management; creation of the IBM Research Healthcare and Life Sciences Institute; creation of a new IBM Clinical Transformation consulting practice and the creation of a new IBM Information-based Medicine business unit.

New Healthcare Offerings and Information Resources
A key focus of IBM's healthcare initiative will be the development of consulting practices and customised industry solutions to help transform hospitals, accelerate medical research, and optimize processes to lower healthcare costs. Each new solution will leverage the healthcare industry insight and consulting methodologies of IBM Business Consulting Services, combined with the deep technology skills and resources of IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences. Among the practices and customized solutions which are being announced are:

- Safe and Lean Healthcare Provider, a solution to help hospitals improve resource allocation, utilization and planning. The solution brings together leading processes, strategies and methodologies, including optimization modelling and simulation tools to help hospitals measure the performance of both clinical and administrative processes, identify cost parameters. It also offers insights into "best practices" from other industries that can help healthcare providers prevent medical errors and improve patient care quality, while also reducing costs and streamlining operations.

- Aligned Clinical Environment, a solution for hospitals and healthcare organisations to integrate, analyze and manage complex and disparate clinical, research and administrative data from multiple systems. The solution provides business insight, tools and methodologies for creating an information-on-demand environment that can help improve clinical quality, safety and patient care. For example, the Healthcare Collaborative Network, a global consortium of public and private sector healthcare organisations is using the Aligned Clinical Environment solution to demonstrate the feasibility and value of a real-time surveillance system that can help detect adverse healthcare and drug events like the outbreak of an infectious disease.

- Centre for Healthcare Management, a resource for information and dialogue on critical issues facing healthcare payers and providers. The new centre will sponsor discussion forums on topics ranging from disease surveillance to healthcare collaboration and data management. It will also support the development of research reports and case studies on innovative industry approaches to improving quality and efficiency.

- IBM Research Healthcare and Life Sciences Institute, which will work with IBM's eight research centres around the world to drive invention and technology innovation specifically targeting the healthcare, life sciences and the pharmaceutical industries.

- Clinical Transformation Practice, a practice which brings together healthcare consultants (who are also physicians, nurses or hospital administrators) with business intelligence experts to help customers transform hospitals and healthcare systems

- Information-based Medicine business unit, to bring greater focus to this high-growth emerging field of medicine and healthcare delivery. Information-based medicine uses IT to help doctors deliver more personalized healthcare, making available data such as genetic profiles, medical images and other research that can be integrated with clinical information to give a more complete picture of factors that may influence a patient's medical condition.