As a major pioneer in the typewriter and then later business and personal computer markets, International Business Machines (IBM) has said that it is taking a step in a new direction now, putting over $100 million into medical research – a surprise move that has caught some analysts and market observers off guard. While it is no surprise that the health tech market is a rapidly growing one, it turns out that the money is going to be spent over the next 3 years to allow IBM to hire doctors and a range of medical field experts to help them create brand new tech advances which they want to take to the medical market. By using its own brain trust of over 100 experts in fields like analytics, cloud computing and research, the company hopes to be able to improve the quality of health care in the US and do more than simply convert medical data into digital formats. They want to step forward, according to the lead of global health care research for IBM Research, Chalapathy Neti, and help clinical decisions to be made with a higher level of intelligence and clarity to not only lower costs, but give patients far better results in the care that they must have in order to heal. This means that treatments could improve and the whole process of receiving such medical care would be streamlined.
IBM labs are also already set to work on various medical related research fields to try and get into the field by signing with low cost genome reader maker Roche, for example.