IBM’s Watson Health Partners, American Diabetes Association Partners in Combating Diabetes

IBM's Watson Health and the American Diabetes Association outlined a long-term partnership on June 12 in New Orleans at the American Diabetes Association's annual scientific powwow.

The partnership aims to conduct a deeper study and analysis on the research and clinical data on combating diabetes. This is for the furtherance of the existing IBM's Watson Health and ADA's study on 300,000 patients' records to track the development of the disease and care management.

ADA and IBM envision providing an answer to the needs of the patients, researchers, healthcare providers, and caregivers.

A challenge has been set for app developers to create a cognitive database for diabetes to help in detections and treatment for patients. They are also encouraged to develop a research database for researchers and medical aid providers to study the progress, stages, demographics and effective treatment routine, according to ZDNet.

Watson Health previously took its first steps in achieving the technologically aided diabetes treatment. They have partnered with Medtronic and came up with Sugarwise, a cognitive application which monitors and analyzes glucose presence on the human body to help detect the disease patterns.

A limited edition of Sugarwise will be released in September. But Watson Health and Medtronic does not stop there. They are working on Medtronic pumps to automatically adjust insulin dosage.

HelpAround, a digital health startup is another aid that Watson received building its platform to easily attend to questions thereby helping diabetic patients.

IBM is also partnering with HMO Maccabi, Israel's third largest HMO, Novo Nordisk and CVS Health in building models to manage diabetes and analyze patient records thereby personalizing the treatment.

A vast increase in diabetes cases has reached to 1.4 million in U.S. yearly. Researchers revealed that there are now 29 million diabetes cases in America and 415 million people around the world.

Failure to manage this condition properly leads to even more serious complications such as hypertension, kidney failure, blindness, and hypoglycemia, as reported by Yahoo.