IBM's jStart team and Health Language, Inc. (HLI), experts in healthcare terminology and coding, are joining forces provide a "one-stop" shop for text analytics service designed specifically for the healthcare industry.

Together, the two will offer new text analytics services for healthcare providers, hospitals and health insurance clients to help harness the growing volumes of clinical and patient data to deliver deeper insight to individual patients and larger patient populations.

This service offering is led by IBM's jStart team, experts in developing and leveraging emerging Internet technologies. The team will have two important resources at their disposal: IBM's advanced text analytics tool called IBM LanguageWare™ technology, which has the ability to parse, analyze, and categorize text; and HLI's Language Engine, a healthcare-specific, text-modeling tool.

Text analytics can help automate and alert healthcare organizations on potential dangers of an individual's drug-to-drug interaction. By cross referencing a list of prescriptions and an external service for known drug-to-drug interaction problems, the service can flag potential conflicts of drug-drug, drug-disease and drug-allergy interactions to healthcare providers, as prescriptions are written.

"There are two critical trends converging in this offering today," said Rod Smith, vice president of Emerging Internet Technologies for IBM Software Group. "First, we see that analytics are becoming requisite tools in healthcare due to increased government regulation, pressure on business performance, and quality-of-care improvements. Second, in the past years, IBM has significantly advanced our capabilities in analytics to extend beyond numeral data to textual data and better data visualization. With that combination, we aim to open up a new world of clarity and insight to the healthcare industry."