The development, known as IHII, will take a prominent part in a new international initiative to prevent the spread of epidemics and various diseases in the world.
Hayadan
A new global initiative, designed to create a common framework for the effort to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, was launched tonight in the USA. IBM's research and development labs in Haifa are also taking an active part in the project, which is heavily based on computing and information systems, and have developed dedicated software systems for the world of health, which help in sharing information about epidemics and in the use of computer systems to predict the spread processes of such epidemics.
The purpose of the new project is to deal with the growing concern in the world about the outbreak of a series of epidemics, and the possibility of a faster spread of diseases through the modern international transport channels. The joint forum for IBM laboratories and the development laboratories of other companies examines the use of advanced methods for computer analysis, as part of the preparation for responding to outbreaks of infectious diseases around the world. IBM will bring to this collaboration a series of infrastructure technologies developed in the "innovation centers for the field of medicine", which operate in the company's research laboratories, including the laboratories in Haifa.
Among the technologies that IBM will offer, you can find a software framework developed in its laboratories that enables the sharing of electronic information on health issues and the mining of this medical data in order to identify trends such as those registered in the early stages of an epidemic. This technology, which has been nicknamed IHII (pronounced I-High), English acronym for "medical information infrastructure for integrated operation", is being prepared in order to improve communication and sharing between medical centers and facilities, in order to collect and share data. IBM will expand this software framework in order to use it to cover a variety of areas related to public health, to respond to the needs of preparing for a global epidemic and to share clinical information between hospitals, laboratories and health and government bodies.
The IBM research laboratories in Haifa took a central part in the development of the IHII systems, together with the laboratories in the USA - and even won awards following this development. According to the company, the work done in Haifa led to the formation of a work environment based on open standards, and allows independent software producers to build a variety of solutions and services on this basis. IHII ties together a long series of solution components in the field of health and life sciences and enables the sharing of information existing in the organizational storage systems together with new information created by the medical service providers, and presenting it at the point of care.
Beaz Carmeli, an expert in information systems in medicine from IBM's research and development laboratories in Haifa, noted that
"Incorporating high technology systems in medical processes is a growing trend in Israel and the world. The recognition of the added value that sharing medical information brings to all entities involved in the process (citizens, healthcare providers, insurers and government bodies) pushes the entire field in the direction of integration and integrated operation based on global standards, and extensive use of open source."
IBM also intends to encourage the establishment of a community of users around its epidemic modeling framework system. The system is based on the information collected in the IHII environment, together with data received from the UN, road maps, aviation services, traffic patterns and migration routes of birds around the world - and makes it possible to quickly develop models that predict the expected spread of epidemics along the timeline. These models may help health experts and governments design and develop more effective programs to prevent and treat epidemics.
In the next step, this accumulation of knowledge may enable a more efficient and faster management of the distribution processes of vaccines and the administration of vaccines to the population. As part of the project "Chess Project", IBM collaborates with the Scripps Research Institute in the study of influenza viruses, in an attempt to predict the future mutation processes of these viruses. The researchers are using extremely high-performance computer systems to develop more effective vaccines against these diseases.
The virus expert
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