IBM Bluemix

Build your cognitive app on Bluemix

Cognitive services allow your app to learn, reason, and consider context. The more data that you feed your app, the smarter it gets.

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Services

Cognitive Services are adaptable, interactive, and contextual in the way they provide information. Instead of simply returning prepared responses, these services provide answers based on what they know to be correct, relying on information they’ve acquired over time.

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Client Case Study

MDA

askMDA

IBM BluemixIBM Watson

For more than 70 years, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has been at the forefront of exploring new ways to prevent and treat cancer. Decades of breakthrough research, treatment innovations, and experience as one of the world’s leading cancer centers provides a critical benefit to its patients: personalized care based on deep knowledge and expertise.

MD Anderson knows that no two individuals are exactly alike—just as no two cancers are alike. That’s why its experts pioneered the approach of creating multi-disciplinary teams that develop individualized plans focused on the whole person, which has led to better care, improved outcomes, and, often, better quality of life.

Patients from all over the world travel to MD Anderson to participate in groundbreaking clinical trials, receive breakthrough treatments, and experience its excellent care. But MD Anderson wants to do more. Their experts are on a mission to democratize their cancer care knowledge and expertise, and to extend their clinical reach far beyond the hospital’s walls. Their dream is to offer every patient an opportunity to potentially benefit from the latest and best personalized, evidence-based cancer care—even if he or she can’t come to MD Anderson.

To make that a reality, MD Anderson has tapped into offerings from IBM Bluemix, a flexible platform that allows MD Anderson and its technology partners to access a common set of tools and services to develop innovative applications to help its cancer-fighting mission.

The MD Anderson Oncology Expert™ (OEA™) system is one such application. A cognitive, clinical decision support tool powered by IBM Watson and other analytics available through Bluemix, OEA can read, remember, and remind, serving as virtual expert advisor system that can help improve the quality of care.

OEA is trained by MD Anderson experts to generate a dynamic and relevant summary of a patient’s disease, and suggest appropriate treatment options supported by published literature and guidelines as well as potential life-saving clinical trials available for an individual patient. It also is designed to support physicians that are managing patients on these treatments to improve outcomes.

MD Anderson recognizes that a virtual system cannot capture all of the “clinical pearls of wisdom” of the world’s experts with decades of experiences. To facilitate another level of sharing of its expertise, MD Anderson developed askMDA™ application on the Bluemix platform. It is a tele-consultation app that can be activated from within OEA to request a live-expert, 2nd-opinion consultation to confirm a diagnosis or discuss treatment options or care management. With askMDA, expert-guided cancer care can start within days—instead of weeks—helping physicians and patients more quickly take action.

As companions to a practicing oncologist, MD Anderson believes OEA and askMDA applications can help break down geographic boundaries between patients and cancer experts, and allow doctors far away the opportunity to tap into MD Anderson’s vast experience for their patients’ care.

With nearly 70 percent of patients coming to Houston from other cities for specialized care and clinical trials offered at MD Anderson, the myMDA app is designed to help ease their personal and medical journey. It learns to personalize suggestions based on the user’s unique profile, which includes personal preferences, medical diagnosis, and treatment plan. For example, it supports lifestyle decisions with evidence-based suggestions on what and where to eat given upcoming tests or medications they’re taking. It also offers other helpful tools like information about getting around Houston and what to see and do.

The Bluemix ecosystem offers users convenient access to an expanding portfolio of technologies on a flexible platform that allows for user collaboration, so that more applications can be developed, more quickly and more easily.

MDA

Partner Case Study

Cognitive Scale leverages Bluemix and Watson to create powerful cognitive services.

These services expand the ecosystem and give customers access to industry-specific cognitive insights and advice. Cognitive Scale leverages Bluemix to build industry-specific cognitive services.

These cognitive services unlock insights and surface advice from “dark data”: data that is unprocessable, neglected, or underutilized. MD Anderson chose Bluemix as it provides a secure, private, and compliant environment that protects patients’ personal data. MyMDA uses Cognitive Scale’s Healthcare cognitive cloud to power the Care Concierge application.

Cognitive Insights

Cognitive
Insight

Cognitive Graph

Cognitive
Graph

Cognitive Commerce

Cognitive
Commerce

MyMDA Care Concierge

myMDA

Patients who struggle from chronic diseases like cancer are under tremendous emotional stress and physical pain. They struggle with diet, medication, and scheduling concerns. In addition, they must also make lifestyle choices from finding the right places to eat, an area to live that is convenient for their treatment, transportation, and activities that meet their needs. These insights and advice are surfaced by Cognitive Scale’s services and are based on the patient’s declared, observed, and inferred preferences and interaction. The application is based on data interpretation and learning systems that continuously update based on the patient’s interaction. Patients have better access to social support as well as stress management when they have to navigate an unfamiliar environment.

The Care Concierge also provides information about MD Anderson and empowers the patient in his or her own care by surfacing personalized, evidence-based information and by providing financial transparency.

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