Few industries have more potential than healthcare for a company aspiring to do pioneering work that’s good for society. IBM has partnered with hospitals, governments and life sciences companies to streamline care, support administration and deliver better outcomes for patients. Its technology has improved the healthcare ecosystem, fulfilling the company’s mission to do good for the world by doing good work for customers.

For more than a century, IBM has found new ways to apply its technology to the problems of healthcare, an industry of labyrinthine operating and regulatory structures. The sector’s complexity has made it a particularly labor-and research-intensive market to serve with scalable solutions. And indeed, IBM has devoted large amounts of research, engineering and consulting resources to delivering more and more sophisticated, customized solutions.

The company saw opportunities in healthcare early on. When the business was precision instruments, it offered clocks to help hospitals streamline administrative and clerical functions and improve basic operations. St. Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, New York, for example, christened a new building addition in 1934 that tripled its bed capacity. It deployed 50 synchronous, self-regulating IBM clocks across the expanded hospital to ensure that everyone from the X-ray room to anesthesia closely timed their care.

The advent of punched cards and tabulating machines brought applications in accounting, budget management and statistical tasks. Hospitals now could “digitize” bookkeeping and compliance and get help with tricky calculations. Researchers began using IBM’s machines to tackle statistics and assist in large-scale projects. IBM’s accounting solution was widely deployed at hospitals by the 1940s, helping finance teams to reduce human error, preserve accounting principles and keep records.

Over time, IBM expanded into other functions. Its punched card machines, sorters and tabulators supported data collection on a 1950s study to determine whether smoking and lung cancer were related. They also provided the number-crunching muscle for Jonas Salk’s research in the development of the polio vaccine. In 1955, Istituti Ospitalieri di Verona, the world’s oldest hospital, stepped into the new age of technology by rolling out an IBM punched card system to assist with everything from inpatient billing to tracking treatment by specialists and lab work. It was the first such deployment in Italy.

The company was also at the forefront of major medical technology developments, including advancements in heart-lung machines that would enable patients to be sustained mechanically during heart surgery, and development of the apheresis machine, which separates and removes blood components and is used in the treatment of leukemia.

As the company entered the computer era, IBM envisioned a healthcare industry of fully integrated, fully online institutions, all elevating patient care through transparent access to data and efficient tools. Making that vision a reality would require digitizing and structuring patient records.

In 1961, IBM installed the first electronic health record (EHR) system at Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio, built on its RAMAC 305. Over the following decades, IBM would continue to encourage the industry to adopt EHRs, building solutions to spur the industry’s evolution to digital records. In 1976, the state of Tennessee, for example, was using an IBM System/370 Model 158 computer to shorten hospital stays by eliminating illegible handwritten records and processing diagnostic information faster.

In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act established incentives for adopting EHRs, but it was unclear when federal money would become available. So IBM staked industry investments by mobilizing its Global Financing arm to provide bridge funding options for healthcare providers pursuing EHR solutions. In 2014, IBM Global Financing was working with 40% of the top vendors of acute-care EHR systems.

Inefficiency and human error cost the healthcare industry billions of dollars annually while diverting resources that could otherwise be allocated to patient care. To help radiologists save time updating patient records, the company introduced speech-recognition software that transcribed oral patient notes into editable copy, removing hours or sometimes days of third-party transcription time. In collaboration with PatientKeeper, the company rolled out a wireless platform for medical order entry, patient monitoring, data gathering, and distribution of prescriptions to help eliminate preventable errors in care.

Networking also showed immediate promise in improving system efficiency. Through a partnership with Baxter Healthcare that began in 1990, IBM developed a data-entry platform for nurses. The 7690 Clinical Workstation operated bedside, sharing information through a central server accessible across a network of terminals.

Over time, IBM’s ambitions moved beyond designing solutions to reinventing the very practice of global healthcare. The business opportunities in developing targeted products were still there, but IBM saw a world where healthcare institutions could harness IBM’s technologies and expertise to tackle the industry’s biggest systemic issues — and reshape the conversation around what the future of healthcare would look like.

In 2009, it heralded the “Patient Centered Medical Home” as a “viable foundation for the reform of today’s unsustainable healthcare system.” It advocated maintaining a long-term relationship with a primary care physician and taking a team approach to care. For it to work, the industry would need to continue to build out IT infrastructure and invest in EHR solutions, decision-support tools, practice-management systems and information exchanges.

That same year the company opened its Global Healthcare Center of Excellence in La Gaude, France, focused on helping IBM clients design and create healthcare and life sciences solutions that improve care delivery, predict and prevent disease, and enable smarter individual health and wellness. It comprised more than 4,000 healthcare IT and process experts worldwide.

“Not only can we showcase healthcare best practice capabilities that we observe around the world, but we can also create a collaborative environment in which to work with clients to create new insights and innovations that improve the value that our health systems provide to citizens,” said Sean Hogan, VP of IBM Global Healthcare and Life Sciences.

In 2015, IBM went even bigger, this time betting the future of healthcare on artificial intelligence and the talents of its cognitive supercomputer, Watson. CEO Ginni Rometty called healthcare the company’s “moon shot” to a cognitive era in which machines would “think” alongside humans to solve the world’s biggest problems. 

Watson Health was developed to help society tame the massive spending expected in areas such as chronic diseases and reduce the more than USD 2.5 trillion lost annually from mistakes made in care. Among its early collaborators were Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic, Apple and Johnson & Johnson. In time, Watson Health would refocus its efforts on delivering targeted products to solve day-to-day challenges in delivering care.

Although IBM sold Watson Health in 2022, the large-scale industry ambitions it inspired remain alive and well. IBM continues its long-standing healthcare efforts by leading in areas like enterprise modernization and applied analytics. As one example, it has helped build confidence globally in coronavirus and other vaccines by applying blockchain, AI and security technologies to speed the medicine from production facilities to doctors in a transparent and trusted way.  The company remains committed to delivering technology to both boost industry efficiency and fulfill the promise of doing good for society by delivering better patient care.