IBM Watson Health, Teva Pharma tie up for Cloud solutions

IBM Watson Health and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd announced on Friday that Teva has been selected as its first Foundational Life Sciences Partner for the Watson Health Cloud. As part of this new strategic partnership, Teva becomes the first global pharmaceutical company to tap the power of the Watson Health Cloud to benefit patients and healthcare providers across geographies.

Teva has chosen the IBM Watson Health Cloud as a preferred global technology platform and aims to build solutions designed to help millions of individuals worldwide with complex and chronic conditions such as asthma, pain, migraine and neurodegenerative diseases.

In addition, a joint Teva-IBM Research team will deploy Big Data and machine learning technology to create disease models and advanced therapeutic solutions.

"Teva is actively exploring the e-health evolution with a strong focus on fulfilling unmet and emerging patients' needs. The IBM Watson Health Cloud provides a strong foundation on which we can realize this vision," said Guy Hadari, senior vice president and CIO for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.

"By building on the Watson Health Cloud, we believe Teva will be in a unique position to put the best information and insights in the hands of physicians, care teams and patients, to empower treatment optimization for individuals and populations across the spectrum of acute and chronic conditions. Watson holds promise to provide Teva with better insights, real-time feedback and options for clinicians to consider to improve patient care."

Watson is a groundbreaking cognitive computing platform that represents a new era of computing based on its ability to interact in natural language, process vast amounts of Big Data to uncover patterns and insights, and learn from each interaction. The Watson Health Cloud provides an open development platform for physicians, researchers, insurers and companies focused on creating health and wellness solutions.

Teva will work with IBM on long-range platform and solutions development, with experts collaborating to enhance IBM Watson Health Cloud capabilities and explore synergies with existing Watson Health ecosystem partners.

The company, which has one of the world's largest portfolios of medicines, expects to develop solutions designed to collect and analyze real world evidence, draw powerful insights and inform a variety of initiatives such as reducing drug misuse or increasing prescribed medication adherence.

"Teva's pioneering digital health vision, reach across global markets, extensive portfolio of medicines and significant industry experience make them a preferred life science ecosystem partner for the Watson Health Cloud," said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson.

IBM's Global Business Services will work closely with a Teva Analytics team to assess the data and the analytics model requirements for the Real World Evidence e-health solution.