Otsuka and IBM Partner in Digital Health Venture

IBM (Armonk, NY, USA) and Otsuka Pharma (Tokyo, Japan) have formed a joint venture to market software that will integrate and analyze psychiatric patient data in Japan.

The joint venture will be named Otsuka Digital Health, with the pharma company taking an 85% stake and IBM Japan holding the remaining 15%. Otsuka will contribute its expertise and knowledge of the central nervous system (CNS), with IBM contributing its Watson-based technology. The joint venture will operate independently of Otsuka pharmaceutical, which is one of the five biggest companies in the world, thanks to products such as the antipsychotics Abilify and Rexulti, as well as oncology and cardio-renal drugs. It also sells the BreathTek device for the detection of H. pylori infection in the stomach.

Otsuka Digital Health will market MENTAT, a software suite that automatically integrates and analyzes patient medical history, which is often based on free text entries and is thus difficult to enumerate. The software will be used to create a psychiatric database through which hospital medical staff can use the patient’s electronic medical record (EMR) more insightfully, ultimately providing better care to patients. In addition to improving the quality of psychiatric treatment, the software will also help staff share useful information with each other more easily.

“In psychiatry, patient symptoms and medical history are not usually enumerated, and are instead entered into non-standardized medical charts,” stated Otsuka in a press release. “This requires hospital staff to spend many hours on analyzing and understanding a large volume of records, with a massive amount of data not being used well.”

A Mentat is a type of human in Frank Herbert’s fictional “Dune” universe that possesses exceptional cognitive abilities of memory and perception, and who is specially trained to mimic the cognitive and analytical ability of electronic computers. Mentats are able to sift large volumes of data and devise concise analyses in a process that goes far beyond logical deduction, extracting essential patterns or logic from data and delivering useful conclusions with varying degrees of certainty. Their calculations are delivered not as numerical probabilities but as flowing paths, subject to new variations through the influence of new factors.

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