In February 2004, IBM announced a $250 million global initiative over three years to increase its presence in the healthcare industry. IBM plans to use this money for solutions development, research and development, business partner collaborations and to hire new healthcare specialists.

IBM’s new offerings for the healthcare industry includes;

- Safe and Lean Healthcare Provider - a solution that helps hospitals to improve resource allocation, utilisation and planning.

- Aligned Clinical Environment - a solution for hospitals and healthcare organisations to integrate, analyse and manage complex and disparate clinical, research and administrative data from multiple systems.

- Centre for Healthcare Management - a resource for information on critical issues that healthcare payers and providers face. It will also support development and research reports and case studies on innovative industry approaches to improve quality and efficiency.

- Clinical Transformation Practice - that brings healthcare consultants (physicians, nurses, administrative staff, other medical personnel) together with business intelligence experts to help hospitals/healthcare organisations to transform their systems/operations.

- The Information-based Medicine business unit - that brings greater focus on high growth emerging fields. With its offerings IBM plans to help a healthcare organisation or a hospital to run its business like an enterprise in any other industry - taking all the benefits of IT and making more knowledge-based decision to improve its delivery of care.

TekPlus Comment:

IBM clearly intends to tap into the lucrative healthcare-IT market with its new products and services offerings for the healthcare sector. Even though it lost significantly in the UK NHS contracts, it has achieved major contracts in Denmark and Austria. At Jutland, Denmark IBM has been chosen to implement a communication system for sharing medical information and at the Austrian Social Security Institutions, IBM (along with Siemens and TeleKom Austria) has won the technology infrastructure contract for a project to issue electronic health cards to Austrian citizens.

Ref: TP0204A04V01