IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer that scored one for Team Robot Overlord two
years ago, just put out its shingle as a doctor or, more specifically,
as a combination lung cancer specialist and expert in the arcane branch
of health insurance known as utilization management. Thanks to a
business partnership among IBM, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint,
health care providers will now be tap Watson’s expertise in deciding how
to treat patients.
Pricing was not disclosed, but hospitals and health care networks who
sign up will be able to buy or rent Watson’s advice from the cloud or
their own server. Over the past two years, IBM’s researchers have shrunk
Watson from the size of a master bedroom to a pizza-box-sized server
that can fit in any data center. And they improved its processing speed
by 240%. Now what was once was a fun computer-science experiment in
natural language processing is becoming a real business for IBM and
Wellpoint, which is the exclusive reseller of the technology for now.
Initial customers include WestMed Practice Partners and the Maine Center
for Cancer Medicine & Blood Disorders.
Even before the Jeopardy! success, IBM began to hatch bigger plans
for Watson and there are few areas more in need of supercharged
decision-support than health care. Doctors and nurses are drowning in
information with new research, genetic data, treatments and procedures
popping up daily. They often don’t know what to do, and are guessing as
well as they can. WellPoint’s chief medical officer Samuel Nussbaum said
at the press event today that health care pros make accurate treatment
decisions only 50% of the time (a shocker to me). Watson, once it is
trained in a medical specialty, can make accurate decisions 90% of the
time. Patients, of course, need it to be 100%, but extending that kind
of improved accuracy (and standardization) to doctors anywhere via the
cloud, right at the point of care, is a powerful tool for improving care
and lowering everyone’s costs, no matter how much they charge for
Watson’ s use. Chris Coburn, the Cleveland Clinic’s executive director
for innovations, said at the event that he fully expects Watson to be
widely deployed wherever the Clinic does business by 2020.
Watson has made huge strides in its medical prowess in two short years. Back in May 2011 IBM had already trained Watson to have the knowledge of a second-year medical student. In March 2012 IBM struck a deal with Memorial Sloan Kettering to
ingest and analyze tens of thousands of the renowned cancer center’s
patient records and histories, as well as all the publicly available
clinical research it can get its hard drives on. Today Watson has
analyzed 605,000 pieces of medical evidence, 2 million pages of text,
25,000 training cases and had the assist of 14,700 clinician hours
fine-tuning its decision accuracy. Six “instances” of Watson have
already been installed in the last 12 months.
Watson doesn’t tell a doctor what to do, it provides several options
with degrees of confidence for each, along with the supporting evidence
it used to arrive at the optimal treatment. Doctors can enter on an iPad
a new bit of information in plain text, such as “my patient has blood
in her phlegm,” and Watson within half a minute will come back with an
entirely different drug regimen that suits the individual. IBM Watson’s
business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use
Watson now follow its guidance.
WellPoint will be using the system internally for its nurses and
clinicians who handle utilization management, the process by which
health insurers determine which treatments are fair, appropriate and
efficient and, in turn, what it will cover. The company will also make
the intelligence available as a Web portal to other providers as its
Interactive Care Reviewer. It is targeting 1,600 providers by the end of
2013 and will split the revenue with IBM. Terms were undisclosed.
No comments:
Post a Comment