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According to SmartPlanet, IBM has announced a $100 million  investment over three years to advance health care research.

“Incentives to shift the healthcare system to one that rewards outcomes instead of volume of care.”

IBM, according to SmartPlanet, said it will focus on three key areas:

• Using raw health data to prove treatment approaches and then deliver personalized care. Specifically, IBM is talking about analyzing the data from advanced diagnostics from things like lab tests and EKGs to better to detect problems and intervene as needed.
• Incentives to shift the healthcare system to one that rewards outcomes instead of volume of care. IBM is talking about business processes changes for the health care industry as well as new payment models.
• Privacy and security of patient data.

Personally, I find it disturbing that a computer company had to take it on itself to show the health care industry that the outcomes are what are important. I’ve seen many cases myself that moving patients in and out is more important than correct diagnosis, proper treatments and cures.

What is the last CURE discovered? If you don’t count vaccines and treatments, I can’t name one. Small pox is the only disease which has been eradicated world-wide due to vaccination. Polio has been eradicated in nearly all countries via the same method. People who had already contracted polio, though, were not cured.

Treatments can put cancer into remission (if it’s caught early) and keep HIV patients alive. But again, no cure.

According to the National Organization for Orphaned Diseases, only about 200 of the nearly 7,000 rare diseases even have FDA-approved treatments. RSDS/CRPS is one of those rare diseases with no FDA-approved treatment.

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Excerpt from ReportLinker

Most of the currently used analgesic drugs fall into the categories of opioids and nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs such as COX-2 inhibitors. Non-opioid analgesics include ketamine, a N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist. Adjuvant analgesics include antidepressants and antiepileptic drugs used for the treatment of neuropathic pain. Management of pain is multidisciplinary and includes both pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods such as acupuncture, transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation and surgery. Various pain syndromes require different approaches in management, for example, the main category of drugs for migraine are triptans such as sumatriptan.

Drug delivery is an important consideration in pain treatment. Controlled release preparations provide a steady delivery of analgesics. Well-known non-injection methods such astransdermal, pulmonary and intranasal application have been used. Topical analgesics and local anesthetics are also available. Devices such as implanted pumps are used for delivery of drugs such as opioids intrathecally (introduction into spinal subarachnoid space by lumbar puncture) in patients with cancer pain.

The wide variety of drugs in development includes opioid receptor ligands, bradykinin antagonists, mPGES-1 inhibitors, glutamate receptor antagonists, substance P and neurokinin receptor antagonists, norepinephrine transporter inhibitors,P2X2 neuron receptor antagonists and nitric oxide-based analgesics. A number of cannabinoids are also in development for pain. Fish-derived tetrodotoxin was initially focused on indication of opiate addiction withdrawal but is found to have an analgesic action as well. Cone shells contain therapeutically useful peptides including the conotoxins, and one such peptide, ziconotide, has been approved. Various cell and gene therapies are also being developed for the management of pain.