Business Intelligence

At the HIMSS Big Data and Healthcare Analytics Forum, design and data visualization guru Teresa Larsen shows how to present information clearly, accurately and attractively.

MUSC said the Avantas services can help it determine patient capacity and labor needs 120 days into the future. 

Fewer than half of healthcare organizations participating in a recent survey are currently using C&BI tools. But HIMSS Analytics anticipates that the shift to value-based care and advances in predictive and prescriptive analytics technologies could change that in the near-term.

Healthcare organizations can better prepare for – and respond faster to – new and emerging cyber threats when improved information sharing plays a bigger role in their cyber defense strategies, according to HITRUST.

Nicholas Marko, MD breaks down the differences between big data analytics and business intelligence, and explains how Geisinger chooses between centralizing and federating data.

Chipmaker said that Lumiata will use the money to drive predictive analytics to improve risk and care management for organizations practicing population health. 

Decisio Health, a startup that aims to help acute-care provider organizations continually improve their clinical processes, launched the Decisio Health Clinical Intelligence Platform Tuesday and also announced $4.5M in Series A funding.

IBM plans to launch a cloud-based version of Watson's cognitive computing technology, designed solely to zero in on cybersecurity language, as a part of a year-long research project, the company announced Tuesday. The Watson for Cyber Security platform is touted as the first technology to offer cognition of security data. Watson will pull the majority of its cognitive data from the X-Force research library: a threat intelligence platform with 20 years of security research, details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and more than 100,000 documented vulnerabilities. "Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cybersecurity jobs by 2020, we'd still have a skills crisis in security," Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security said in a statement. "The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime." [Also: IBM Watson offers free storage to Apple ResearchKit developers] Beginning in the fall, IBM will also collaborate with eight universities to expand the amount of security data the company has already inputted into the platform. California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and New York University are among the institutions who will work with IBM to contribute to Watson's training. The students will also train Watson on cybersecurity language, while working close with IBM's security experts to learn how to read security intelligence to gain first-hand experience in cognitive security. IBM plans to process up to 15,000 security documents – threat intelligence reports, cybercrime strategies, threat databases – each month over the next training stages in collaboration will all stakeholders. Watson for Cybersecurity will not only provide insights on any emerging threats, it will also make recommendations on how to stop them. Additionally, the system will use data mining techniques to find outliers. IBM will begin beta production deployments later this year. "By leveraging Watson’s ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations and knowledge to security professionals," said van Zadelhoff, "bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cybersecurity analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training."

In another big surge for healthcare hiring, the industry added 44,000 jobs in April -- representing more than a quarter of the 160,000 jobs created that month, according to data released Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

IBM is making quantum computing available to the public, providing access to a platform from any desktop or mobile device via the IBM Cloud. It has implications for healthcare, where another supercomputer, IBMWatson, is already at work helping researchers and clinicians eradicate cancer, making sure the world’s population gets better sleep and sorting big data to boost genomics work and precision medicine. With IBM Quantum Experience, the new cloud-based platform unveiled today, users can create algorithms and run experiments, learn about quantum computing through tutorials and simulations and get inspired by the potential of a quantum computer. The goal, say IBM executives, is to make it easier for researchers and the scientific community to accelerate innovations. [See also: IBM Watson teams up with American Cancer Society to pit cognitive computing against cancer.] Today’s announcement comes days after Big Blue launched on April 29, secure blockchain services for healthcare, government and financial services on the IBM Cloud. Blockchain is the technology underpinning bitcoin, but IBM executives and others note that blockchain is much broader than bitcoin. "Clients tell us that one of the inhibitors of the adoption of blockchain is the concern about security," Jerry Cuomo, vice president, Blockchain, IBM, said in a statement. "While there’s a sense of urgency to pioneer blockchain for business, most organizations need help to define the ideal cloud environment that enables blockchain networks to run securely in the cloud." [See also: IBM Watson takes analytics prowess overseas: Supercomputer to work on big data and genomics in Italy.] Blockchain becomes more attractive wrapped in the new security framework IBM introduced on April 29 along with new blockchain services IBM’s quantum processor, IBM Quantum Experience, is housed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. A universal quantum computer can be programmed to perform any computing task and will be exponentially faster than classical computers for a number of important applications for science and business, according to IBM executives. “Quantum computing is becoming a reality and it will extend computation far beyond what is imaginable with today's computers," said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director, IBM Research, said in a statement. "This moment represents the birth of quantum cloud computing. By giving hands-on access to IBM's experimental quantum systems, the IBM Quantum Experience will make it easier for researchers and the scientific community to accelerate innovations in the quantum field, and help discover new applications for this technology." Twitter: @Bernie_HITN Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com