The program is useful enough to potentially become used worldwide, according to Jacobson, who is also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

"At any level, it can be used to bring together patient data," she said.

Although the Blue Spruce platform is still being developed in IBM's research labs, the company has already used it to build a system for Reuters that lets traders collaborate in real time between continents.

One of the difficult hurdles IBM overcame was getting separate data feeds in the mashups to communicate with each other, such as when clicking on an image in one feed should reorient a map in another, said David Boloker, CTO of IBM's emerging technologies, told reporters at a research presentation on Thursday.

Internet users will be able to design their own applications for the platform when it is released in June, Boloker said.