IBM Public Relations Chugs Away on Watson and Health Care

October 2, 2011

IBM shows continues to pitch the potential of its supercomputer Watson. IBM sees Watson as the health professional’s Florence Nightingale with a degree in library science and a PhD in health insurance statistics. Computerworld reported on this development with the article “IBM’s Watson to Diagnose Patients.”

The idea is that two is always better than one and its not just IBM that is in on this idea–Blue Cross Blue Shield’s largest health plan Well Point agreed to create joint applications.

These applications are rooted in evidence-based medicine and have the capacity to use Watson’s search analysis to review all prior cases, clinical know-how, and medical literature to assist doctors in diagnosing and treating their patients.

In helping us understand what makes this possible, Computerworld outlines the specs on Watson in their article:

Watson consists of 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers powered by 8-core processors — four in each machine — for a total of 32 processors per machine. The servers are virtualized with a kernel-based virtual machine scheme, resulting in a server cluster with a total processing capacity of 80 teraflops. (A teraflop is one trillion operations per second.)

Our local hospital still uses big fat monitors and clunky monospaced input forms. No supercomputers in sight. In fact, the hospital riffed 500 health professionals with more cuts coming. Watson may be just what the doctor ordered, right?

Clinical pilots early next year will be the first step before Watson becomes the norm in your physicians office. As IBM continues to hammer away at this project, they’re definitely not putting a dent in their reputation.

Sounds good. Now the cost, the infrastructure, and the upkeep? No problem, of course. My doctor wants a new Audi convertible. He didn’t mention Watson as a must have the last time I spoke with her.

Megan Feil, October 2, 2011

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.