Thought Leadership
Case Studies
CCM Case Study: IBM
Founding Partner with the Center for Connected Medicine:
IBM values opportunity to collaborate with industry thought leaders and introduce customers to integrative technologies representing the future of healthcare.
Rarely do corporations have the chance to truly revolutionize an industry, especially one as immense and complex as healthcare. A handful of leading health information technology (HIT), telecommunications, equipment and construction firms, however, have found themselves with just this opportunity. Through the visionary Center for Connected Medicine, they are collaborating on solutions to drive the future of patient-centered, accountable healthcare in the United States.
Among the leaders of this movement is IBM, which—along with other healthcare and technology innovators—founded the Center in 2009 to develop a blueprint for innovative patient-centered and population health models using strategically integrated HIT solutions.
During its first two years of participation, IBM leadership has discovered the extensive value the Center offers. It’s an intelligence resource, technology development platform, partnership breeding ground and sales tool all rolled into one, according to Christine M. Kretz, IBM Healthcare Solutions’ Executive."The Center is one of our major virtual and physical hubs for collaborating around the future of connected medicine,” she says, “and our only shared briefing center. The Center offers a world-class opportunity for our clients to understand the larger opportunity for connected medicine and to explore enabling technological solutions available today that may advance this aspect of healthcare's transformation."
The value of participation
Although collaborating externally at this level may be somewhat counterintuitive to large organizations, IBM saw the opportunity early on. Underlying its decision to proceed as a founding partner was its great respect for other Center participants and the thoughtfulness of the protocols put in place to protect individual partners’ interests. “We understood that in healthcare, collaboration among multiple vendors is fundamental to a mission of quality,” Kretz says. “We quickly became excited to share the story of collaboration with the other partners.”
The partners’ involvement in the Center, she points out, in many ways mirrors the role each company are required to play within a large health system. Organizations must deploy a wide spectrum of vendor solutions in order to function as a single entity. The partners mirror this diverse collection of players, and the Center provides an environment where they can explore and demonstrate the value of an integrative approach. The result of this collaboration not only improves the delivery of care for the benefit of providers and patients, but also enables the partners to take lessons learned and use them to grow their business. It’s a collaborative environment that simply doesn’t exist outside of healthcare, according to Kretz.
The unexpected benefits of collaboration
Since 2009, IBM has been one of the most active users of the Center’s resources, introducing its guests—including corporate leadership, current customers and prospective clients—to the real-world application of a connected medicine model. Through interactive real-life scenarios, visitors are introduced to integrative technology and are able to follow its impact through a variety of simulated settings. Their visit—which may occur over a single day or spread across two—concludes with in-depth and practical discussions of attendees’ goals, objectives and challenges led by an internally recognized visionary and practicing surgeon who serves as the Center’s medical director, Andrew R. Watson, MD, MLitt, FACS, and the Center’s leadership team.
IBM initially expected that the greatest benefit it would realize from its partnership in the Center would be the opportunity to demonstrate its product and service offerings in an applied environment. “We had it in the back of our minds that it would simply be a showcase for our solutions, which was really an underestimation of the Center’s potential,” Kretz says. The actual value, she adds, has been much more expansive.
Perhaps the most notable, she says, is how the Center has provided the chance for IBM to strengthen its existing relationships with large industry players such as Alcatel-Lucent and Verizon. Further, it has revealed additional partnership potential with a diverse mix of technology companies—and even created opportunities to meet with prospects who were visiting the Center as guests of another firm.
Before the establishment of the Center, Kretz notes, vendors operated in an environment as disjointed as the healthcare industry itself. Firms delivered proposals and presentations in a vacuum, lacking the opportunity to collaborate or act upon a vision that would encompass another company’s role in solving integration or technology challenges. The Center not only introduces these players to one another, but provides a setting in which they can begin to explore workable solutions that accelerate their customers’ success—as well as their own.
For example, the Center has emerged as a product development hotbed for IBM. With the knowledge it gains from the medical expertise and practical application of its solutions in a real-world healthcare environment, IBM has found opportunities to hone its existing offerings and create entirely new business lines. IBM and UPMC, for instance, have leveraged the partnership to form a separate company called SmartRoom, which focuses on improving clinical workflow and providing in-context information for clinicians at the bedside. “This never would have happened without the relationships and level of collaboration we’ve built at the Center,” Kretz says.
The impact of objective thought-leadership
IBM also likewise has found the Center and its world class team to be an incredibly valuable thought-leadership resource. In this way, IBM executive leadership and sales professionals, who may not be healthcare experts, can gain insights on the industry and the future of medicine. This perspective helps IBM representatives better explain to customers and prospects the advantages that advanced connectivity technologies can provide. In addition, the Center enables the IBM team to introduce healthcare providers directly to clinicians, executives and subject-matter experts who have successfully explored and implemented integrated solutions. Dr. Watson in particular can talk directly with IBM clients on a clinical, as well as technical, level.
~ Christine M. Kretz, IBM Healthcare Solutions’ Executive
Access to these specialists, Kretz says, adds authority to the message IBM wishes to convey to its constituencies. “We’re happy to tell healthcare leaders about all the capabilities IBM has for their organization but, because we are a vendor, prospects may or may not believe what we’re saying,” she says. “There is a certain amount of credibility that comes from front-line medical experts that we do not always enjoy.”
While many visitors represent HIT leadership, IBM views the Center as an opportunity to reach out to a broader audience of healthcare executives, as well, including chief medical and nursing officers, department chairs and quality directors. “We’re able to attract a constellation of titles who all desire to get on the same page in terms of connectivity,” according to Kretz. “The mood in healthcare is that organizations need to gain control of their IT initiatives if they are to achieve desired clinical quality and operational improvements.”
Ideally, visitors leave the Center with new insights and methods for reinventing their organizations, streamlining their processes, and improving patient outcomes and experiences. But their experience doesn’t end there. As IBM has found, the first visit usually paves the way for one or even two more stops at the Center, typically with other individuals from the organization in tow.
Either informally or with specific objectives in mind, IBM has a continuous stream of clients visiting the Center—typically among the biggest healthcare providers in the country, but also smaller healthcare organizations that may be struggling to get their arms around new healthcare regulations and the technologies that enable compliance. It invites customers from all over the globe, recently hosting healthcare leaders from Romania, Japan, Korea, Spain and Portugal.
The opportunity to influence the future of healthcare
Just as healthcare must continue to develop new capabilities, IBM recognizes that its contributions to and through the Center will mature in order to influence evolution of the industry. It plans to supply the Center with more resources, expand the content it makes available to visitors, and increase the connectivity – using tele-presence – to other IBM facilities, Kretz says. “We have a story to tell about how we’ve grown with the other partners to develop greater functionality and improved analytical capabilities. We’d like to help the Center develop even deeper demonstration levels to showcase how the delivery of healthcare can be transformed.”
For example, IBM plans to leverage the Center’s advanced technologies—including the perceptive pixel touch-screen computer that dominates the lobby of the Center—to tell the story of improved outcomes through analytics. This device allows IBM’s customers and prospects to calculate basic ROI on various enabling technologies they may consider deploying in hospital setting.
Likewise, IBM is assisting in the development of virtual tour of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, which will demonstrate how real-time reporting and interconnected technologies help clinical users make better decisions more quickly. The demonstration will explore platforms that bring together physicians and facilities, and integrate health plans and care management efforts, to help clinicians improve access and quality of patient care while better managing costs. By implementing networking capabilities, communication solutions and electronic health records on a virtualized infrastructure, viewers will witness how caregivers have seamless access to consolidated patient information.
“The Center offers a world-class opportunity for our clients to understand the larger opportunity for connected medicine and to explore enabling technological solutions available today that may advance this aspect of healthcare's transformation."~ Christine M. Kretz, IBM Healthcare Solutions’ Executive
“We’ve come a long way from the days of paper records and images filed away in the vaults,” Kretz points out. “The efforts undertaken through the Center and via this virtual tour allow us to showcase a realistic, electronic healthcare experience where paper is a thing of the past. It’s an environment where health records, images and financial documents must be accessible to many people across the continuum of care when and where they need it.”
In short, she says, IBM’s partnership with the Center has enabled it to provide a vision and a blueprint for the future of healthcare. “We are delighted to be a part of this exciting undertaking to illustrate the strides that are possible within the industry. We’ve experienced firsthand how thought leadership and vision have come together to supply practical and viable solutions to the challenges we all face.”
