One Million Healthy Children

Last Thursday, IBM Research announced a collaborative research effort with Georgia Tech that aims to improve pediatric healthcare from a payment and policy level. The project, called One Million Healthy Children, will apply advanced modeling and analytics to thousands children's healthcare records to better understand the inefficiencies that make up today's model, which encourages fee for service, rather than prevention and precise diagnoses. By examining factors far beyond the realm of medicine - the region's literary make-up, transportation hubs and access, healthy food stores and socioeconomic status of families - IBM and Georgia Tech hope to provide doctors, policymakers and patients a better idea of how to approach disease. The team will first look at diabetes, which accounts for over $174B in costs in the U.S. per year. 


The modeling technology used in this initiative was born out of IBM Research - Almaden, by a services research team led by Paul Maglio. The Smarter Planet Platform for the Analysis and Simulation of Health is a tool that uses a plug-and-play type of format to insert factors making up a population's health - the systems of systems so to say. IBM researcher on the project, Cheryl Kieliszewski tells us a little more about the project:

We are thrilled to partner with Georgia Tech on the One Million Healthy Children project.  Together, we aim to tackle a difficult, multi-dimensional problem in health – kids experiencing preventable chronic non-communicable diseases, such as obesity and diabetes, at ever younger ages, and which will have a major influence on overall health and well being throughout their lifespan.  To do this, we will explore a number of ways to create and use complex composite models to examine what-if scenarios to improve children's health.  

The partnership brings together Bill Rouse and his team at Georgia Tech, which has expertise in complex adaptive systems, in particular within healthcare modeling, and our team, which has expertise in composite model assembly. On the one hand, it provides the team an opportunity to help understand a difficult societal challenge – keeping our kids healthy – and on the other, it forces the team to confront technical issues, such as how to semi-automatically couple models from different domains, and also social and process issues to support complex decision making. We’re very excited about the potential of this project and for continued work with the Georgia Tech team.

IBM Press Release
"What Is or What If" - IBM Research news blog guest post by Professor William Rouse, Georgia Institute of Technology's Tennenbaum Institute Executive Director, co-chair of the National Academies Healthy America Initiative and member of the National Academy of Engineering
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