Legal Research

IBM's "Watson" to Assist Health Professionals

A recent IBM press release announced a  multi-year research initiative  between IBM and Nuance Communications to explore the use of the Watson computing system to assist doctors and other healthcare professionals in the treatment of their patients.  Watson, of course, is the super-computer who handily beat Jeopardy super-champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in mid-February.  The initiative between the 2 companies will combine IBM's Deep Question Answering, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance's speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding to help physicians diagnose and treat patients.  The two companies expect to be able to offer commercially-available products resulting from their collaboration in about 18 to 24 months.  Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine will lend their medical expertise and research skill in helping IBM and Nuance achieve their goals.

Watson's ability to analyze the meaning and context of human language and quickly process information can offer answers to a patient's diagnosis and treatment that the physician might not have thought of or it can help him validate in his own mind  what he may have already considered.  As the press release states, "a doctor considering a patient's diagnosis could use Watson's analytics technology, in conjunction with Nuance's voice and clinical language understanding solutions, to rapidly consider all the related texts, reference materials, prior cases, and latest knowledge in journals and medical literature to gain evidence from many more potential sources than previously possible".  This would help the doctor determine the most likely diagnosis and best treatment options with much more confidence than "going it alone".   The combination of the computer's ability to wade through and process vast quantities of medical information and the doctor's own professional experience and knowledge should definitely improve diagnosis accuracy and thus patient safety.  But at what price?  Whatever products come out of the IBM/Nuance collaboration will not be cheap, I don't think.  Who will pay for them – the physicians, the hospitals, the insurance companies, and/or the patient himself?  The collaboration between man and computer should increase the quality and efficiency of healthcare but will that be negatively offset by the increased cost of the new technology?  I hope not, because I, for one, would certainly welcome a computer such as Watson helping my doctor decide the best treatment for any future disease/condition that I might get!  Comments?

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on March 08, 2011 (boomark / email).