Made in IBM Labs: IBM Reinvents the Patient Portal

New healthcare portal offers increased patient safety and empowerment.

Today IBM announced the next evolution of the patient portal, significantly expanding the types of information, alerts, recommendations and interactive coaching healthcare providers can offer to their patients online.

The IBM Patient Empowerment System goes beyond simply allowing patients to schedule appointments online or access a personal health record. The portal is based on new technology developed by IBM Research in collaboration with physicians and administrators of the Gacheon University Gil Hospital in Korea. Among the largest medical centers in Korea with approximately one million patients, the hospital recently decided to provide physicians and patients with access to the portal as part of a pilot project to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

The IBM Patient Empowerment System is a standards-based platform, enabling patients to integrate and manage their healthcare data for all medical needs, receive personalized recommendations or alerts for safer medical treatment, and immediately access data from a vast range of sources including: third-party health portals, hospital electronic medical record systems, sensors, home devices for monitoring health conditions, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) alerts, medical sites like PubMed, and more. IBM is previewing the system this week at CeBIT in Hanover Germany.

"Today, patients want to be more involved in managing their clinical data, and are eager to discover relevant and useful medical information for their benefit," noted Dr. DongKyun Park from Gacheon University Gil Hospital in Korea. "By giving patients access to information that is relevant to them in an easy and understandable form, we can greatly improve patient safety during medical treatments."

The system's easy-to-use analytical services can reduce costs, increase safety and improve patient satisfaction. By integrating social and medical data from multiple sources, the system allows patients to take an active role in their treatment, bringing the interaction between patients and caregivers to a new level of collaborative teamwork.

The system is also designed to protect privacy at various levels of granularity, enabling members to exercise fine-grained control over the level of information in their profile that can be viewed by others and its usage.

"Most patients do not have the same access to information available to physicians, such as treatment updates or new warnings from the FDA," said Joseph Jasinski, IBM Research. "And physicians are not always privy to ongoing patient updates, such as eating habits or long-term monitoring of vital signs. These partial pictures limit the level of care that physicians can provide, as well as the care patients can provide for themselves. The IBM Patient Empowerment System merges these realms, bringing important data to both parties."

Although more public sources for medical information are becoming available on the Internet all the time, this onslaught often leaves patients more confused rather than more knowledgeable. Weeding out relevant and accurate information in this sea of data is difficult for the typical patient but the IBM Patient Empowerment System uses expert analytics to take into account a patient's personal medical history and offer decision support information that is appropriate for them.

One example where public knowledge could