Armonk, N.Y.-based International Business Machines (IBM) recently unveiled new software for the healthcare industry that will aim to help health care providers and payers improve patient care and reduce costs. The new software offering uses content analytics similar to what is found in IBM's Watson technology.

Seton Healthcare Family is the first client to adopt and use the technology, called IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare. The solution will allow healthcare organizations to extract relevant clinical information from vast amounts of patient data to better analyze the past, understand the present, and predict future outcomes.

By combining IBM's Watson technology with industry solutions offerings, Seton intends to focus the new content and predictive analytics solution on the root causes of hospital readmissions, and ways it can decrease preventable multiple hospital visits.

IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare will aim to allow doctors and healthcare professionals to go far beyond traditional search and analysis of unstructured data. They can advance diagnosis and treatment by accurately extracting medical facts and understanding relationships buried in large volumes of clinical and operational data. The IBM software transforms raw information into healthcare insight quickly by revealing trends, patterns, deviations and predicting the probability of outcomes, allowing organizations to derive insight in minutes versus weeks or months, or not at all.

The new IBM software gives clinical and other knowledge workers and executives several ways to interact with analyzed information including searching, exploring, mining, monitoring and reporting.