Watson Supercomputer Now Available to Doctors for Advice

Story first appeared on USA Today -

The Watson supercomputer is graduating from its medical residency and is being offered commercially to doctors and health insurance companies, IBM said Friday.

IBM, the health insurer WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced two Watson-based applications — one to help diagnose and treat lung cancer and one to help manage health insurance decisions and claims.

Both applications take advantage of the speed, huge database and language skill the computer demonstrated in defeating the best human "Jeopardy!" players on television two years ago.

Armonk-based IBM said Watson has improved its performance by 240 percent since the "Jeopardy!" win.

In both applications, doctors or insurance company workers will access Watson through a tablet or computer. Watson will quickly compare a patient's medical records to what it has learned and make several recommendations in decreasing order of confidence.

In the cancer program, the computer will be considering what treatment is most likely to succeed. In the insurance program, it will consider what treatment should be authorized for payment.

Watson (actually named for IBM founder and not the Sherlock Holmes' friend, Dr. Watson) has been trained in medicine through pilot programs at Indianapolis-based WellPoint and at Sloan-Kettering in New York.

Manoj Saxena, an IBM general manager, said the supercomputer has ingested 1,500 lung cancer cases from Sloan-Kettering records, plus 2 million pages of text from journals, textbooks and treatment guidelines.

It also learned "like a medical student," by being corrected when it was questioned by doctors and came up with wrong answers, Saxena said in an interview.

"Watson is not making the decisions" on treatment or authorization, Saxena said. "It is essentially reducing the effort for doctors and nurses by going through thousands of pages of information for each case."

The lung cancer program is being adopted by two medical groups, the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and WestMed in New York's Westchester County. Saxena said it should be running at both groups by next month.

WellPoint itself is already using the insurance application in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Wisconsin. It will be selling both applications — at prices still to be negotiated — and will compensate IBM under a contract between the two companies, an IBM spokeswoman said.

WellPoint said using Watson should not increase insurance premiums because of savings from waste and errors.

IBM, Aetna Unite to Offer Clinical Cloud Support Service

Reuters

 

IBM and Aetna Inc on Thursday jointly launched a service aimed at helping hospitals improve patient care by making better use of electronic medical records and other digital data.

International Business Machines Corp said the service, developed with Aetna subsidiary ActiveHealth Management, would help physicians access patients' health data like previous medical records, claims, and lab data from multiple sources and quickly analyze what the best treatment might be.

The service, which will incorporate IBM's analytical software, is also designed to flag overdue check-ups and alert doctors to which patients in their wards require the most immediate attention.

These services could help hospitals reduce medical mistakes and unnecessary tests and treatments, IBM said.

Robert Merkel, vice president and healthcare industry leader of IBM Global Business Services, said: "With the adoption of electronic medical records, there's a huge increase in digital information that's available on patients. We're leveraging that information and providing deep analytical insight to support doctors and patient care, and providing the most advanced analytics."

The service will also help physicians and hospitals measure their performance against national standards. Doctors who show higher quality, lower-cost care could win higher reimbursement rates from insurance companies.

IBM has over the past decade shifted its focus from hardware to software and services, and is investing heavily on developing more analytical and predictive technologies that can be used to, for example, prevent fraud or help ease traffic congestion.

The company also sees the healthcare market as a key business opportunity, with the overall health IT market estimated at around $20 billion.

In addition to that, Merkel said, IBM was hoping to win access to $30 billion of federal funds for the adoption of electronic healthcare records. The Obama administration has created incentives to encourage doctors and hospitals to move to electronic record-keeping, with subsidies available from 2011.