Calling Dr. Watson

My good buddy Scott Laningham from developerWorks recently conducted a Q&A with IBM Rational software guru Grady Booch.  You can check it out in the video down at the bottom of this post.

He also talked to the “hat lady.”  I’m not going to explain who the “hat lady” is.  If you don’t know who she is, you can find out via the video!

And FYI, Booch is going to be doing a keynote at Innovate 2011 about the Watson technology (remember Watson V. Jeopardy!, where the computer won back in February??). Booch is going to go deep on the subject from the Innovate stage in Orlando.  You can learn more in Scott’s interview.

Speaking of Watson, as we head into a long holiday weekend here in the U.S., let it be known that IBM announced earlier today the expansion of its Health Analytics Solution Center in Dallas, Texas.

Some background: Since opening in Big D in late 2009, the HASC has worked with more than 150 hospitals, health plans, and other healthcare organizations to drive smarter healthcare.  It provides clients access to health analytics experts, tech architects, and specialists, as well as to hundreds of health industry experts from across IBM.

As part of HASC’s expansion, the center is incorporating some of the same technology used in IBM’s Watson. Using sophisticated analytics to understand the meaning and context of medical information, advanced health analytics is increasingly being used to help healthcare orgs gain new insight from the explosion of health data growing at the rate of 35 percent per year!

You can learn more about this new expansion here, and about IBM’s smarter healthcare initatives here.

In the meantime, have a great, long, restful holiday weekend, and please, for those of you in the American family, don’t forget to remember those who have given their lives in the service of this country.

Until next week…and now, here’s Scott, Grady, and the “hat lady!”

IBM Launches Health Analytics Center in Dallas

As part of its continued investment in the business analytics space, IBM announced yesterday the launch of its Health Analytics Solution Center, another in a network of global centers addressing the growing demand for advanced analytics.

The IBM Global Solution Center in Dallas is intended to help hospitals and medical staff improve decision-making and provide higher quality care, and will employ more than 100 health analytics experts, technical architects and specialists, with access to hundreds more health industry experts from across IBM.

This will be the first center of its kind to address the need for advanced analytics across the health care industry, taking advantage of increased computing power to collect and analyze data streaming in from sensors, patient monitoring systems, medical instruments, and handheld devices, not to mention the volumes of data generated by hospitals every hour.

This data can be used to bring a new level of intelligence to health care to help doctors, nurses, and medical staffs tackle complex problems such as disease management, patient population studies, and the like.

The IBM Health Analytics Center is part of a business strategy recently detailed by IBM as the company expands its capabilities around business analytics.

IBM is also opening six other analytics solution centers in Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, New York City, London, and Washington, D.C., and as part of this initiative, expects to retrain or hire as many as 4,000 new analytics consultants and professionals globally.