IBM's Dr. Watson (Watson Supercomputer) to bring Automation to Healthcare. Are you Ready?

Star Trek’s unnamed computer capabilities are coming to Healthcare. IBM's Supercomputer Watson (Dr. Watson) has been under development since 2006. It is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. It utilizes workload optimized system design based on IBM's DeepQA software and POWER7® based 90 servers. It first made headlines earlier this year in February when IBM’s Watson won the popular TV Quiz show “Jeopardy” against humans.

The first commercial venture for IBM’s Watson supercomputer is Healthcare Industry. To excel at healthcare Dr.Watson is presently being uploaded with medical data from all over the world and it constantly updates its data sources. IBM and Nuance Communications Inc. have partnered for the research project to develop a commercial product during the next few months that will exploit Dr.Watson’s capabilities as a “clinical decision support system” to aid the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Physicians at Columbia University Medical Center are working with IBM to identify critical issues in the practice of medicine where the Watson technology may be able to contribute and physicians at the University of Maryland Medical System are working to identify the best way that a technology like Watson could interact with medical practitioners to provide the maximum assistance in healthcare.

IBM announced its agreement (September 2011) with health insurer WellPoint to jointly commercialize Watson. IBM’s Big Blue has developed the application to help the health care industry reduce hospital admissions. The company announced the new software on October 25, 2011. IBM “Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare” (Dr. Watson) would enable doctors and healthcare professionals to go far beyond traditional search and analysis of unstructured data. They can advance diagnosis and treatment by accurately extracting medical facts and understanding relationships buried in large volumes of clinical and operational data. The IBM solution transforms raw information into healthcare insight quickly by revealing trends, patterns, deviations and predicting the probability of outcomes, allowing organizations to derive insight in minutes versus weeks or months, or not at all. As a result, healthcare professionals can find more effective ways to care for high-risk patients, provide safer patient care, and develop new models for reimbursement for quality care.

Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was recently authorized by the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program to start penalizing for excess readmissions for 3 Disease conditions, namely, congestive heart failure (CHF), pneumonia, and acute myocardial infarction (AMI) starting on October 1, 2012 and Dr. Watson will be more than glad to help.

Are you ready as a Health Care Provider or a Patient?

Thank you for updating your medical knowledge at Online Health Expert.

Sincerely,

Harish Malik, M.D.