Empowering Doctors and Patients to Manage Chronic Diseases

Chronic diseases present a global burden, both on patients and on our healthcare systems. Widespread chronic diseases, like asthma, which is estimated to impact 400 million people around the world by 2025, remain uncontrolled in many patients despite decades of availability to proven medications. Many people living with asthma, for example, still experience uncontrolled symptoms and frequent attacks – often due to incorrect inhaler use or poor adherence to treatment. The need exists for therapeutic solutions that enable a systematic, comprehensive approach to help people take control of their health conditions.


To address the global impact of chronic diseases, Teva and IBM reveal, for the first time, that they are working together on an initiative that combines Teva’s therapeutic technologies with IBM Watson’s cognitive computing. Together, the companies aim to enable patients, healthcare providers, and payers to better understand and control chronic conditions, and track treatments.

The chronic disease management collaboration will combine cloud-connected drug delivery and app technology with more than six billion data points processed by Watson to provide actionable insights, including the first-ever integration of data from The Weather Company. Using Watson’s cognitive processing capabilities and newly developed algorithms these data may be used to calculate the prospective risk of health events, such as an asthma attack, with Teva delivering that information directly to caregivers and their patients via an app or other software interface.

“Teva envisions a future where we can empower patients and their families to better understand diseases, like asthma, and cope with health challenges in a more systematic, data-driven manner, with the ability to be proactive, rather than reactive,” said Rob Koremans, MD, President and CEO of Teva Global Specialty Medicines. “In doing so, we aim to cut treatment costs by providing patients, payers, healthcare providers and caregivers with relatable data that can inform action and insights into a patient’s total disease management plan.”

The IBM Watson Health Cloud is a health-data enabled platform-as-a-service. It provides a foundation for cognitive offerings and is designed to help healthcare organizations derive individualized insights and obtain a more complete picture of the many factors that can affect people’s health. Teva’s use of the IBM Watson Health Cloud will comply with operational and security requirements for health data.

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