Apple, IBM Have Big Plans For Big Data

Technology giants Apple and IBM are chipping away at their goal to release 100 enterprise apps by the end of the year, a feat that would be the culmination of their recent partnership aimed at the B2B world.

The firms’ most recent release of enterprise apps revealed a focus on health care providers, including tools that use iBeacon technology to provide nurses with patient information on their iPad or iPhone when in the vicinity of the patient’s home.

With their most recent announcement, it looks like Apple and IBM are teaming up to yet again strengthen B2B services for the health care industry. Reports released Monday (April 13) say that the companies are planning a new way to use big data to aid health care providers, though experts say they have an uphill battle ahead of them. While the industry outputs data that doubles about every two months, according to research, the challenge is in organizing this unstructured information and turning it into something useful.

IBM unveiled the Watson Health Cloud Monday, the platform through which Apple and IBM will sort this data for the health care industry. According to reports, the service will allow patient data storage as well as access to IBM’s data analytics tools.

“IBM’s secure data storage and analytics solutions will enable doctors and researchers to draw on real-time insights from consumer health and behavioral data at a scale never before possible,” said IBM Senior Vice President of Research and Solutions John E. Kelly III.

Data will flow in through Apple’s ResearchKit and HealthKit software services and, most likely, through the health care apps developed in conjunction between the two firms. This week, Apple also announced that ResearchKit would be available to medical researchers to aid the development of new health care apps.

Independently, Apple is working on additional innovations for the health care segment. Most recently, the company announced plans to integrate Apple Pay into the health care payment network, allowing patients to pay with the mobile payment tool.