IT is pushing medical care to a new era, IBM exec says

BOSTON - The convergence of life sciences and IT, now in its early stages, means that we'll live longer, perhaps significantly so, as doctors have better access to data that will help them prevent, diagnose and treat diseases, Caroline Kovac, the general manager of IBM Corp.'s life sciences group, said Wednesday at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo.

The profound changes in medical care won't initially happen in doctor's offices but at research facilities and large pharmaceutical companies, with collaborative projects that lead to massive databases of information about patients, she said, speaking here on the second day of the conference. Those stores of data will be tapped into by those involved in health care, including pharmaceutical companies that will develop better, safer clinical drug trials.

IBM calls this future health-care system "information-based medicine." Some have suggested IBM prefers that tag over "specialized" or "personalized" medicine because its acronym is IBM, Kovac said, but then admitted that it took those in the company's life sciences group three weeks to realize that. They might be more on the ball, though, when it comes to insisting that, contrary to what some think, this new type of medicine "is going to happen sooner than we think," Kovac said.

Sequencing the human genome marked "the race to the starting line," and signaled the start of major new projects related to creating databases of information that, for example, track genealogies and can be used to figure out who is likely to come down with certain diseases. Kovac pointed to the work of Reykjavik-based deCODE Genetics Inc. to collect data on people in Iceland as a way to determine genetic causes of common diseases. Similar work is being done in Estonia, Kovac said.

"This whole issue of genealogy and population data is going to be very important," she said.

A ripple effect will occur as genetic causes of diseases are determined, with prevention becoming a cornerstone of medical care, but with issues arising such as how health-care providers will be paid for preventing a disease that could be years away from actually occurring in a patient. Despite issues such as these, the life sciences-IT convergence presents "tremendous opportunities" to vendors from both sides that seize those opportunities rather than shy away from them, Kovac said.

Before the opportunities are realized, however, the infrastructure must be put in place to build electronic-records databases. Those exist now in health care but are often used for billing and record keeping to track matters such as "who had surgery this morning," she said. The difference in what will occur in the future is that doctors will actually use such database systems, which eventually will be a combination of patient records and genomic records, to practice medicine.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine