IBM, HHS collaboration to 'start with space for 50' workers in Stelco tower
IBM Canada executive Ross Rosier: Difficult health problems will be solved in Hamilton
The announcement of a coming Hamilton partnership between IBM Canada and Hamilton Health Sciences made a splash last month.
But even though the organizations announced a physical space where the healthcare innovation centre will live – the Stelco Tower – the entities involved have kept the partnership's parameters, and how much of that space they'll need to house workers, open and vague.
The opportunities, and the need, are great for creative people to think of new ways to deliver health care to an aging Ontario population, Rosier said.
"There's a big problem coming towards Ontario, and most of the provinces in Canada, around being able to continue to deliver health care as we know it today," Rosier said. "Guys like me, who are 65 or older, the baby boomers, there's a tremendous bulge of us coming forward that are going to put real demand on the health care system."
Rosier said the partnership will "start with space for 50" in the Stelco tower this fall, but he can imagine the number of jobs created from commercializing the ideas generated there to greatly surpass that.
Some of those 50 may be members of startups and companies looking to scale up their businesses, he said, funded in part with provincial dollars. And some "people across the world" will participate virtually, too.
The possibilities are endless, he said. "Could we fill the whole tower? Of course we could. Nothing better than delivering and building applications to solve that problem of baby boomers becoming non-baby boomers."
It's not affordable or practical for the province to keep the same approach to healthcare when the needs grow exponentially, he said.
'This is the recipe we want to create'
Rosier was in Hamilton to speak at an event on Monday that celebrated innovations-in-progress by graduate engineering students at McMaster University's W Booth School of Engineering Practice.
Could we fill the whole tower? Of course we could.- Ross Rosier, IBM Canada
Rosier acknowledged it's a bit unusual for a company to announce it's moving into a physical space, but doesn't yet know exactly how many cubicles it'll need until it knows which projects it will start with.
The teams will likely involve IT specialists, information technologists, "design thinking" people who can help the concepts become realities, and medical experts who can bring real life experience to bear.
How many of them? It's unclear right now.
"The answer to your question is, we don't know," he said. "Until we say, 'This is the recipe we want to create,' you don't know."
Rosier has been with IBM for 42 years. When the company's cognitive computing technology – its popular Watson technology – came to the foreground in the last five years, he said, he couldn't retire yet.
"I want to stick with this; I want to see this play out, in terms of what we'll do to address the needs that you and I have," he said.
Not only treatments, but possible cures
As an example, he mentioned:
Last week, engineering students Jacob Jackson and Ahmed Elmeligi won $20,000 at McMaster's startup competition.
Their pitch was for a wearable monitor, like a bandana, that someone who's at risk of having a stroke in his or her sleep could wear – and hopefully cut down the number of hours the person goes before he or she receives treatment for the stroke.
Ideas like that will be the basis of the centre, he said. Rosier said the company's cognitive computing Watson technology will play a role — the same technology that famously beat trivia masters Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.
So will the fields of predictive analytics, coming up with ways to monitor patient vital signs and predictors of health events.
Like the bandana.
"So now we're collecting information about people who are potentially having strokes, and it's the assimilation of that information, along with looking for patterns in that information, which allows you to come up with not only treatments for it, but potentially cures for it as well," he said.