Watson Goes To Medical School

August 11, 2014

Watson has been trying his hand at becoming a gourmet chef, but now the smart machine plans to support healthcare providers with medical knowledge. According to Technology Review, “IBM Aims To Make Medical Expertise A Commodity” and support organizations by giving them a cheaper way to improve their expertise. The push to make medical knowledge a commodity comes from the rising worry that cancer rates are going to soar in the next decade and there will not be enough medical professionals to go around.

IBM wants to prove that Watson can be used beyond cooking and answering trivia questions. The computer has been deployed in two beta tests with hopes it will improve service quality and take the paper work load off healthcare professionals:

“Lynda Chin, a professor of genomic medicine at MD Anderson and a leader of the center’s Watson project, anticipates that in the future that kind of product will be highly valued by general oncologists and regional cancer practices. ‘Physicians are too burdened on paperwork and squeezed on revenue to keep up with the latest literature,’ she says. That limits the care physicians can deliver, and it has financial consequences: ‘If you can’t make a decision based on your own knowledge, you have to refer the patient out, and that’s going to hurt your bottom line.’”

Dr. Watson has yet to earn money for IBM, whose revenue has decreased the past two years due to cloud deployment. The betas are only being used for research and development and they are demonstrating that Watson has trouble deciphering medical jargon.

IBM is trying to earn a buck on the changing medical industry. The article ends on how IBM will try to monopolize Watson for healthcare, but it is disappointing that the patients come off as an afterthought. Making money comes first, while saving lives is second.

Whitney Grace, August 11, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Technology

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One Response to “Watson Goes To Medical School”

criminal law office florida on August 17th, 2014 4:47 am

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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.