Is information the answer to every problem? Perhaps, as IBM sees it, only with the right amount of access and analysis.

The company is about to put IBM Watson, the Jeopardy-playing, dinner-cooking, cloud-based supercomputer in a blender with billions of healthcare data bits. The result: Watson Health Cloud.

The goal is a recalibration of healthcare costs through always-available access to information about personal health and how it compares to health details about millions of anonymized others.

“We believe a very large portion of healthcare spend is preventable,” said John Kelly, IBM’s SVP of solutions research, in an interview with Mashable. “Costs can improve dramatically through these technologies.” Kelly is so confident in Watson Health Cloud that he thinks it can not only halt the growth of healthcare costs, but also reverse them.

Regardless of whether IBM can achieve this lofty goal, it’s not alone in its efforts. The company acquired up two healthcare companies, Phytel and Explorys, the latter of which has roughly one-sixth of the U.S. population’s healthcare data, according to IBM. The company would not reveal how much it paid for the private firms.

IBM is also partnering with Johnson & Johnson and, notably, Apple, which announced ResearchKit last month, a platform that lets researchers leverage data captured on iPhones to help them fight diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes. Watson Health Cloud will work with both ResearchKit and HealthKit, which Apple unveiled as part of iOS 8.

If a user agrees, the data collected by HealthKit and ResearchKit is exposed to those designing wellness apps, but many companies accessing that data have no access to other data. “So we’ll put that cloud right behind ResearchKit and HealthKit so your data can be compared to the data of millions of people to have better healthcare,” Kelly explained.

IBM and Apple are already partnered on industry-specific mobile solutions. While IBM Watson is ingesting the Explorys data, it will likely take a few weeks for Apple’s products to have access to the Watson Health Cloud.

In practice, consumers won’t access all this data as much as companies like Johnson & Johnson will be using it to improve on healthcare solutions for mobile devices like the iPhone (and the Apple Watch, when it ships).

For example, Johnson & Johnson is collecting data regarding hip and knee replacement surgery. It would want to use this system to push recommended post-surgical activities and therapies directly to the Apple Watch (which Kelly “absolutely” ordered).

When it comes to healthcare data, there are, naturally, concerns about privacy. The majority of the data in Watson Health Cloud is anonymized and used for analyzing conditions and health trends across large populations. However, the system will also have your personalized data, which be used to improve your own care.

“When it comes through your doctor or hospital, it will be re-identified for you but no one else, so we can get the information back to you and your doctor as you see fit,” Kelly said.

Analyzing healthcare data to improve treatment and manage costs is hardly new, but none will have Watson’s built-in cognitive abilities. Kelly contends that IBM’s Watson Health Cloud is the largest healthcare data cloud.

“Many companies have tried to do it through their own lens… but no one has attempted to build a cloud of this scale,” he said. “We can do it at a size and scale across all these elements across these industry, yet platform open so people can develop solutions on top of this.”

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