IBM SALES AND DISTRIBUTION
Solution Brief
Highlights
● Connect patients to their complete
care team through a more cost-
efficient and convenient exchange of
personal health and fitness information
● Enable people with chronic conditions
to manage their health at home
through sensor-equipped medical
devices that share vital data directly
with their care team
● Empower the elderly to age independ-
ently, with dignity and security through
basic life monitoring in their homes
● Motivate individuals to achieve weight
loss and fitness goals by connecting
them more directly to their health and
wellness team
Sensor solutions for smarter healthcare
Connected home health
Growth in the population of chronic conditioned, elderly and obese
individuals around the world necessitates new models for care and col-
laboration between patients and healthcare providers. To support these
efforts, IBM is an early, contributing member of Continua Health
Alliance, a nonprofit alliance of healthcare and IT companies dedicated
to providing standards for providers to exploit new sources of data
from medical devices and sensors.
The connected home health solution from IBM combines data
from sensors and medical devices located within a patient’s home and
IBM’s business process management, event processing and business
optimization capabilities to deliver new insights to care teams. This
solution is designed to help improve healthcare management across
three key domains: chronic disease management, elderly monitoring,
and health and wellness.
Chronic disease management
Over 600 million people worldwide have chronic diseases, and the
spending on chronic diseases is expected to increase. For example, in
the U.S. alone, spending is expected to increase from US$500 billion a
year to US$685 billion by 2020. Connected home health can help
people with chronic conditions, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease (COPD), diabetes, congestive heart failure and hypertension
manage their conditions more effectively and live healthier lives.
Patients can take their blood pressure, weight, glucose level, tempera-
ture and other vital signs at home using special devices that automati-
cally transmit the results to a personal health system in their home and
on to a monitoring service where they can keep track of their condi-
tion. For instance, if a patient’s weight drops, their blood pressure gets
too high or other issues are reported, their care team is notified and
can take action immediately.
This can help improve the patient’s health, and also reduce healthcare
costs through early detection of health issues. In addition, by allowing
patients to manage their own care at home, connected home health can
empower them to take ownership of their own health. And it enables
better coordinated care across disciplines by providing an integrated
view of a patient’s health information.
IBM SALES AND DISTRIBUTION Sensor solutions for smarter healthcare
Solution Brief

Elderly monitoring
There are 600 million elderly individuals worldwide, and this number is
expected to double to 1.2 billion by 2025. Connected home health can © Copyright IBM Corporation 2009
enable these people to age independently, with dignity and security. In addition
IBM Corporation
to monitoring vital signs through sensor-equipped medical devices, our solution Route 100
can use sensors to assist with daily health and monitoring tasks, and provide Somers, NY 10589
early warnings using biosensor data collection. Produced in the United States of
America
If everything is the norm, family caregivers are notified as such on a regular November 2009
All Rights Reserved
basis. If the patient doesn’t take their medication, for example, the caregiver is
also notified so they can call the patient and remind them to take their medi- IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and
cine. If there is an emergency, first responders can be notified immediately. WebSphere are trademarks or
registered trademarks of International
Business Machines Corporation in the
Health and wellness United States, other countries, or both.
If these and other IBM trademarked
Connected home health can even help prevent obesity and other illnesses terms are marked on their first
by enabling healthy individuals to share information from fitness equipment, occurrence in this information with a
pedometers, weight scales, blood pressure cuffs and other devices directly with trademark symbol (® or ™), these
symbols indicate U.S. registered or
their weight loss and fitness coaches. This can help them stay motivated and common law trademarks owned by
achieve their goals by connecting them to their health and wellness team IBM at the time this information was
through a more efficient exchange of their personal fitness information. published. Such trademarks may
also be registered or common law
trademarks in other countries.
Software to empower patients and care providers A current list of IBM trademarks is
available on the Web at “Copyright
Our connected home health solution, based on IBM® WebSphere® Sensor and trademark information” at
Events, collects and correlates data and events from all types of medical devices, ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
providing a platform to aggregate, analyze and visualize events. That data
Other product, company or service
can be integrated into existing electronic medical record systems and disease names may be trademarks or service
management applications for management of diabetes, congestive heart failure, marks of others.
and other chronic diseases or medical conditions. It is based on Continua,
Integrated Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), Health Level 7 (HL7) and service ori-
ented architecture (SOA) standards. In addition IBM offers analytics and portal Please Recycle
software for trending, scorecarding and data visualization of the data collected
from home medical devices. IBM Healthcare Accelerator combines with
IBM WebSphere Portal software to help empower patients via an online patient
portal.

For more information

To learn more about connected home health from IBM, please contact your
IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/healthcare

HPS03005-USEN-00