IBM Partners With Mayo Clinic

IBM Partners With Mayo Clinic

IBM and the US Mayo Clinic have announced an agreement to jointly develop an information system designed integrate patient records and give Mayo Clinic investigators access to information that can help them more rapidly carry out clinical research and support clinical decisions.

When completed the system should help investigators understand illnesses on a molecular level and support improved treatment decisions.

The system will enable the Mayo Clinic’s medical staff to pull together a wealth of medical data to support medical treatments, including genomic information from public and private databases and retrospective studies of millions of archived records collected from consenting patients.

During the first phase of development, due to be completed by the middle of 2002, the database system will be populated with archival data that can immediately support research, including epidemiological studies.

The goal of subsequent phases will be to bring in aggregate patient genomic information, as well as proteomic data and research information, from a variety of databases.

"Our goal is to help Mayo Clinic quicken the pace of clinical research and positively impact the treatment of patients at the world’s largest private health care organisation," said Dr Jeff Augen, director of strategy, IBM Life Sciences.

The system will help investigators identify research participants that meet precise clinical trial criteria. It will also help investigators conduct large-scale clinical research across a broad range of diseases, complex diagnoses and treatment categories.

Dr Piet de Groen, the Mayo project director of the collaboration and consultant, Mayo Clinic Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, said: "When completed, this new system will immediately benefit our research activities by providing investigators with rapid access to clinical data for use in ongoing research activities."

IBM has developed new data warehousing technologies to address Mayo Clinic’s unique requirements for patient confidentiality, structuring and querying heterogeneous medical records.

The system is being designed to provide links to other public and private data sources using IBM’s DiscoveryLink data integration software.