IBM and German aviation firm team to put healthy pilot data in the cloud
Published December 18, 2014
NEWS BRIEF--IBM announced that German startup Preveniomed, an aviation health services firm, has chosen IBM Cloud to manage patient data and health records on pilots from around the world.
Aviation medicine is a crucial area of occupational medicine, as the safety of passengers depends directly on the health of pilots, aircrews and security personnel. Aviation laws mandate that pilots applying for a license are required to take and pass a health exam before they can fly an airplane, helicopter, or airship in a commercial or recreational capacity. The sensitive patient data is collected, stored, and closely tracked by the doctors to ensure that pilots are in optimal health.
Preveniomed recently decided to store its patient’s encrypted data and launch its mission critical patient-data monitoring applications on cloud infrastructure from IBM SoftLayer to take advantage of the security and always-on availability. By integrating its patent data with web-based applications hosted on the IBM Cloud, doctors at Preveniomed are able to reliably access it from anywhere and know that it is secure.
IBM has long seen aerospace and defense, from commercial airliner design to military aviation, as a sector of technological development and sales opportunity. The company identifies the maintenance, repair, and overhaul market as a hotbed of evolution, and IBM counts the biggest engineering firms in the world as partners.
Earlier this year, Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Corp. company, also chose IBM to manage big data solutions and broaden its performance monitoring capabilities of more than 4,000 operational commercial engines.
“By incorporating learnings from our military engines programs where we are pushing the envelope in terms of monitoring capabilities, and teaming with IBM to integrate component and system health information, we will strengthen our commercial engine health analytics offering for customers,” says Matthew Bromberg, President, Pratt & Whitney Aftermarket, in a release.
Preveniomed worked with IBM business partner eperi to migrate to the IBM Cloud.
"We opted for IBM and eperi as our IT partners because it allows us to protect our patients' data from outages with cloud infrastructure that is always available and accessible from anywhere," says Dr. Andreas Adrian, physician and founder of Preveniomed, in a release. "Being in the very sensitive healthcare business, one of the compelling reasons for the SoftLayer solution was the data protection we achieved by using the eperi encryption technology."
Preveniomed will concentrate on its core tasks in aviation medicine while IBM manages its IT infrastructure, enabling it to seamlessly protect data and scale with confidence. The global reach of SoftLayer's cloud platform is also important for Preveniomed as the company plans to expand to offer services across Europe and the U.S.