IBM Watson Health gets new home and its first GM

IBM Watson Health on Thursday opened its new headquarters in Cambridge and introduced a pair of cloud services.

IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance is aimed at biomedical companies that need help with fast-track deployment of GxP compliant infrastructure and applications, while meeting requirements for hosting, accessing and sharing regulated data. The Watson Health Cloud-launched in April along with IBM Watson Health-provides an open development platform for physicians, researchers, insurers, and companies focused on creating health and wellness solutions.

Meanwhile, the Care Manager is an integration of Watson Health, Apple’s HealthKit and ResearchKit.

In addition, IBM announced new partnerships with Boston Children’s Hospital, Columbia University, ICON plc, Sage Bionetworks and Teva Pharmaceuticals in leveraging Watson’s capabilities. The headquarters will also host a Health Research Lab. The Israeli firm expects its work with IBM on the long-range platform to lead to the development of solutions designed by the analysis of real world evidence. Sage and Teva plan to make Watson Health Cloud their organizations’ preferred development platform. This comes barely a week after Salesforce debuted a data aggregator called Salesforce Health Cloud.

ICON said it will tap Watson to help automate the process of identifying patients who meet the criteria for a clinical trial, and to analyze protocols to assess trial feasibility and identify optimal trial sites.

Commenting on the announcement, ICON’s Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Steve Cutler, said: “Recruiting the required number of patients for clinical trials is a constant challenge for our customers and can represent more than 30% of total study costs”. At the same time, ICON enhances IBM Watson’s capabilities by providing expertise into clinical trial protocols and clinical operations.

Deborah DiSanzo is the first general manager of IBM Watson Health.

Former Philips Healthcare CEO Deborah DiSanzo steps into the new role of Watson Health general manager and is charged with growing the cognitive computing unit that IBM established in April.

IBM has named Boston Children’s Hospital Watson’s foundational pediatrics partner. They join CVS Health, Medtronic and Yale University, among others.

DiSanzo will also oversee a roster of clients, collaborators and partners that includes Johnson & Johnson, Apple, Medtronic, Epic, and CVS Health, IBM said. It allows medical professionals’ to factor a broad range of determinants into a personalized patient engagement program, with the intent to vastly improve individual health outcomes.

All of these moves, taken together, advance the strategy that IBM senior vice president Mike Rhodin described in a prepared statement as “driving a new era of health, enabling entrepreneurs and industry leaders to address diverse needs, spanning the earliest stages of research all the way through to clinical care and population health through to consumer wellness”.