IBM is taking steps towards more holistic approach to health care. Its data analytics software is already there in well-known medical research trials conducted at the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Sloan Kettering.

The company is now changing the basic Watson technology into a cloud platform, Watson Health Cloud, which will be useful for hospitals, doctors, insurers and patients. And that offering would be the attraction of a new Boston-area business unit, IBM Watson Health.

According to IBM Senior Vice-President John Kelly told Fortune, "We are going into the health care business in a big way. We all recognize that outcomes aren't what we hope for. Costs are skyrocketing. On the other side, so much data is collected. . We want to provide better insights, for better outcomes".

According to IBM, the average person will leave a trail of over 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime between digitized diagnostics, electronic medical records and wearable medical devices. IBM's new business focuses on changing that information into something helpful.

According to Kelly, this platform will be the largest site of health care data in the world after some time. Three prominent early partners, which will use Watson Health Cloud as the foundation for their own medical intelligence services, are Apple, Johnson & Johnson, and Medtronic.

The platform will help in creating Apple's HealthKit and ResearchKit applications; it will be used by J&J to create mobile apps that instruct caregivers on pre-operative and post-operative procedures; and Medtronic will be creating a service for diabetes patients.

Kelly said that there are many companies in line. And this means that there could be more partnerships.