IBM Helps Public Health Community in the Middle East

It's hard to believe in this day and age that many healthcare organizations still communicate via fax, phone and spreadsheet. They're transmitting critical information -- information about our health, arguably the most valuable asset we have -- over unsecured, unreliable, outdated systems. Now, IBM is working with partners in the Middle East on an innovative new way to monitor and protect public health.

IBM Research has developed a unique new system that allows public health officials in Israel, Jordan and Palestine to share and exchange health data, while protecting patient privacy, and to monitor and react to potential disease outbreak -- even across geographic and political boundaries.

In collaboration with Nuclear Threat Initiative's Global Health and Security Initiative and the Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance (MECIDS), IBM has developed a system to help eliminate many time-consuming tasks that are common to the public health community, allowing MECIDS members to focus on critical tasks such as detecting emerging public health trends, pinpointing potential outbreaks and performing sophisticated analysis.

Category:

Science & Technology

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• ibm
• healthcare
• middle-east
• NTI
• MECIDS
• almaden
• haifa