PITTSBURGH — The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center plans to partner with Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University to collect and analyze patient health care data and, hopefully, use that information to create ways to better treat some illnesses.

The Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance was announced Monday in hopes it could help doctors and hospitals rapidly detect outbreaks of various illnesses, or even develop smartphone applications that could be used to improve the health of a person based on their own physical, health or genetic characteristics.

The alliance will be funded by UPMC, but the data mining and other work will be done by Pitt’s Center for Commercial Applications of Healthcare Data and CMU’s Center for Machine Learning and Health.

UPMC Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Romoff says the partnership will create an “innovative ecosystem” for health data in the Pittsburgh region.