IBM strikes digital health deal with Apple, Medtronic and J&J

IBM has struck partnerships with Apple and the world's biggest makers of medical devices, to put health data from Apple Watches into the hands of doctors and insurers, and to create personalised treatments for hip replacement patients and diabetics.

IBM's push into digital healthcare will allow users monitoring their heart rate, calories burnt and cholesterol levels using Apple's HealthKit platform to upload the information from an IBM app to a storage cloud, where it will be accessible to their doctors and insurance companies. Those who opt in to Apple's ResearchKit will also be able to share their data with medical researchers.

The agreement is the latest instance of deeper ties between the healthcare and technology sectors, in anticipation of an explosion in the amount of medical data that people collect using their smartphones or "wearables" like the Fitbit or Apple Watch.

John Kelly, senior vice-president at IBM, described Apple's HealthKit and ResearchKit platforms as "really unique" but said there was currently "no systematic way of pulling the data together and sending it" to physicians or clinical researchers. "We are . . . providing a huge cloud and a secure database as a backstop," he said.

IBM's partnership with Apple is not exclusive, but the group said few companies could offer the iPhone maker the same storage and security capabilities. "[Apple's] sense is that this is very sensitive data. They feel really good about our reputation for operating secure data centres," said Mr Kelly.

IBM said it would also market a set of analytical tools to physicians, researchers and insurers, enabling them to collate the data from Apple's devices with patients' electronic medical records so they could spot patterns to support clinical trials or help bring down rising healthcare costs.

The tools will be built using Watson, IBM's "cognitive computing system", which can query large sets of statistics and identify patterns.

"The average patient will collect a terabyte of medical data in their lifetime. Our analytics will be able to find the dots, the clues that are eluding us, and find new breakthroughs," said Michael Rhodin, senior vice-president of IBM Watson.

Mr Rhodin said he expected consumers, especially younger ones known as "millennials", to opt in to having their data used in clinical research trials because they had a vested interest in contributing to the next big medical advance.

"The generation who buy Apple Watches are interested in data philanthropy," he said. "Many of them have been touched by relatives or parents struck down by disease. Why wouldn't they help researchers figure out what's going on?"

IBM's partnership with Apple was announced alongside a handful of other healthcare tie-ups, including with Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic, the world's largest makers of medical devices such as insulin pumps and replacement knees and hips. <

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J&J has asked IBM to build a "coaching system" to ensure patients are fit enough to undergo spinal surgery or joint replacement, and to encourage them to do the right exercises after their operation. The system would prod the patient into doing more physical activity if they were not losing enough weight ahead of their procedure, for example.

J&J recently announced a separate collaboration with Google to build a new generation of surgical robots.

IBM is also working with Medtronic on a smart diabetes treatment system that would take readings from a patient's glucose monitor and ensure their insulin pump dispenses the precise amount of drug required.

A new IBM unit known as Watson Health will house the healthcare ventures, which the company hopes will help revive its flagging fortunes. It said it had reached agreements to acquire Explorys and Phytel, two US-based companies in the field of healthcare analytics, to bolster its data crunching capabilities. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The group, known as "Big Blue", has been contending with shrinking revenue for three years, as new cloud computing enterprises struggle to fill the gap left by the troubled hardware units it has sold off.

It struck a deal with Twitter in October to apply data from the microblogging network to real-time business decisions for IBM's enterprise customers. Last July it signed a separate alliance with Apple to find business applications for consumer devices such as iPhones and iPads.

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