IBM recently announced a new way for doctors to more helpfully advise their patients on the right treatments for them using a biomedical analytics platform which allows doctors to more precisely target the specific needs of each patient, leading to better outcomes and cutting costs at the same time, according to a company press release.
This personalized form of medicine will be applied to the management of cancer, hypertension and AIDS patients.
Collaborating with the Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, a research and treatment cancer center in Italy, IBM Research is developing a new decision support solution that is actually being used by the institute’s physicians to give patients not just the standard protocol for their diseases, but personalized treatment based on their specific needs. It’s done through “automated interpretation of pathology guidelines and intelligence from a number of past clinical cases, documented in the hospital information system,” according to the press release. The institute, located in Milan, Italy, provides pre-clinical and clinical oncology services.
Sciencedaily.com notes that drugs do not work the same on all patients. A treatment that produces a good outcome for one patient may be totally ineffective on others. In some cases, a drug used to treat a disease can even produce a fatal outcome, according to the story. “By examining genetic differences among individuals and administering drugs on the basis of such findings, the impact of side effects can be reduced,” says the article. That is what this solution is created to do.
I know when I was going through cancer treatment, I wished I wasn’t just being given what they gave everyone – surgery and then radiation. What if it didn’t work for me? And turns out it didn’t, when I had a recurrence two years later and required more drastic surgery. Would things have been different if I’d been offered more personalized treatment? Who knows? But it would have been nice to have been offered that.
Selecting the most effective treatment depends on a number of things, including age, weight, family history, current state of the disease and general health, according to the press release. After crunching all that data, the result, using the analytics platform, is a more informed and personalized method of treatment, which allows doctors to provide more accurate and safe care.
IBM’s healthcare analytics solution, Clinical Genomics (Cli-G), works by integrating and analyzing all available clinical knowledge and guidelines, then correlating that with patient data to come up with the best treatment for a particular patient, according to the press release. With the copious amounts of data involved, and the critical demand for putting it together with medical knowledge and guidelines so it makes sense, and decisions possible, complex solutions to make it all work are crucial.
IBM Research – Haifa developed the new prototype, which works by looking at a patient’s personal make-up and disease profile, and then combining that information with “insight from the analysis of past cases and clinical guidelines,” all of which offers a better picture of what would serve the patient best and reducing costs by helping clinicians choose more effective treatments the first time around, the press release says.
“Making decisions in today’s complex environment requires computerized methods that can analyze the vast amounts of patient information available to ease clinical decision-making,” said Dr. Marco A. Pierotti, scientific director at the Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, in the press release. “By providing our physicians with vital input on what worked best for patients with similar clinical characteristics, we can help improve treatment effectiveness and the final patient outcome.”
“Our clinical genomics solution may enable care-givers to personalize treatment and increase its chances of success,” added Haim Nelken, senior manager of integration technologies at IBM Research – Haifa, in the press release. “The solution is designed to provide physicians with recommendations that go beyond the results of clinical trials. It may allow them to go deeper into the data and more accurately follow the reasoning that led to choices previously made on the basis of subjective memory, intuition, or clinical trial results.”
Edited by
Jennifer Russell
