Siemens Healthineers is entering the population health management market through a partnership with IBM.
The move comes about two years after Cerner acquired the hospital information systems business line of Siemens Healthcare, leaving medical imaging and diagnostic laboratories as Siemens’ core business in the United States, with the name changed to Siemens Healthineers.
Now, Siemens will sell IBM’s Watson Care Manager population health management suite of software and services, as well as offering consulting services.
“We are at an unprecedented time in healthcare,” Deborah DiSanzo, general manager for IBM Watson Health, says. “Mature and developing markets are increasingly focused on how patient outcomes are optimized, quality is standardized among individuals and across populations, and costs are reduced. Siemens and IBM are ideal partners to work at the forefront of this evolution and enable personalized healthcare in the U.S. and globally.”
Watson Care Manager is a population health management system using Apple apps to enable consumers to collect and share data with clinicians to support patient engagement. Leveraging IBM’s acquisitions of care management vendor Phytel and population health analytics vendor Explorys, Watson Care Manager in 2015 held data on 90 million lives.
Using Apple HealthKit, data can be moved from a device to a cloud application. Using Apple ResearchKit, providers can better manage the signing up of patients for clinical trials. In total, Care Manager supports development of personalized patient engagement programs to improve individual outcomes, the companies say.
Executives from both IBM and Siemens also plan to co-develop new population health management tools.
Date: October 11, 2016