World Health Day: Improving healthcare data quality

Yesterday, the World Health Organization launched World Health Day 2011. This year's campaign focuses on "Antimicrobial resistance and its global spread," which coincidentally ties in with the recent announcement out of IBM Research - Almaden on nanoparticles designed to treat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But researchers at Almaden have been working on healthcare extensively in areas ranging from data management and analytics to services. IBM Distinguished Engineer and Healthcare Informatics expert Steve Welch explains the motivations of IBM Research to improve healthcare from an information management perspective.

As healthcare data is undergoing substantial growth worldwide, a significant portion of healthcare information remains an untapped resource, primarily due to the fact that it is unstructured in nature. This information is comprised of text, imaging, video and is spread across disparate heterogeneous systems. At IBM Research - Almaden, we are in the pursuit of improving data quality to support clinicians and clinical researchers alike. This includes uncovering and linking all of the available unstructured and semi-structured medical evidence to provide coherent, consistent, and standardized patient clinical data for upstream analytics envisioned by modern health standards but not yet realized in real world systems.

Our goal is to exploit our extensive experience in Information Management and Big Data analysis to improve healthcare data quality with smart domain tooling and data integration platforms that enable secondary use analytics such as disease progression, predictive outcomes, adverse drug events, and comparative effectiveness of treatment regimes.