IBM today announced that it has teamed with University of North Carolina Health Care (UNCHC) to speed the development of new treatments for diseases such as diabetes, cystic fibrosis and cancer.

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With the storage provided by the Carolina Data Warehouse for Health, medical researchers can analyze vast amounts of patient data uncovering trends in a matter of seconds. This avoids the time-consuming manual analysis of large quantities of patient records and treatment options

"With the deployment of the Carolina Data Warehouse for Health, we have been able to increase the timeliness of the information available to our researchers, staff and physicians," said Donald Spencer, MD, MBA, Associate Director of Medical Informatics, UNC Health Care. "Because the system can also support general queries that relate to the diagnosis and treatment of a wide array of patients, we are now able to make more intelligent decisions leading to improved patient care."

Built on IBM software and hardware with global services expertise, the CDW-H focuses on diabetes disease management and performance measurement.

Dr. Spencer estimates that the warehouse has narrowed the time frame for clinical research significantly. Queries that would formerly take weeks now take seconds, he notes. The entire workflow of preparatory research, through regulatory approval, to obtaining a data set will drop from months to weeks.

  Currently the project is focused on three major subject areas:

  --  Cohort Selection - primary users are researchers who need to determine
      cohort availability for studies, grants, clinical trial recruitment
      using de-identified (all personal information removed) data.
  --  Diabetes Data Mart - primary users are clinicians and analysts in the
      practice area. They utilize the data mart to gain access to
      information and statistics on diabetics, and pre-diabetics for disease
      management, performance reporting and analysis.
  --  Inpatient Data Mart - primarily used by the Quality Improvement Office
      and hospital analysts to support performance improvement efforts, core
      measures reporting and hospital patient population studies/analysis.

"This new data warehouse will allow healthcare professionals to work more intelligently, speeding the development of treatments for disease," said Dan Pelino, General Manager, Global Healthcare and Life Sciences, IBM. "Sharing data on this scale heralds a new era of healthcare, where coordinated, patient-centered care and an adherence to evidence-based medicine can improve the quality of care delivered to people around the world."

The data warehouse is built on the IBM Health Integration Framework and takes advantage of InfoSphere and WebSphere software, running on System z mainframe and System p computers. UNCHC has now moved the data warehouse into production with secure web portal providing access to anatomized cohort query selection, diabetes and inpatient data marts, business intelligence reports and analytics applications, and supporting clinical translation research.

IBM leads the industry in helping clients transform their business processes. A key reason for this leadership is a unique portfolio of industry-specific solutions that draw upon IBM's extensive services, software and hardware capabilities and combine these with a service oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. IBM clients are able to rapidly deploy these pre-configured solutions into their existing IT infrastructures because they are based on open standards. These solutions build upon IBM's industry framework strategy which provides a roadmap of pre-tested software and extensions, developed by both IBM and its business partners, which have been specially configured to meet an industry's specific needs.

With more than 8,000 client engagements worldwide, IBM is the SOA market leader. This leadership in SOA is further illustrated by 7,420 IBM SOA business partners, 300 SOA-specific technology patents, a community of greater than 120,000 architects and developers, and more than 2,000 universities advancing the SOA curriculum.

For more information on IBM healthcare offerings and the IBM Health Integration Framework visit: www.ibm.com/healthcare.

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All other company, product or service names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of others. Statements concerning IBM's future development plans and schedules are made for planning purposes only, and are subject to change or withdrawal without notice. Reseller prices may vary.

  Contact:  Chris Rubsamen
            IBM Media Relations
            (914) 766-1803
            rubsamen@us.ibm.com

First Call Analyst:
FCMN Contact: rubsamen@us.ibm.com

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SOURCE: IBM