Watson Has Health Care Partners
April 14, 2015
Fresh from its triumphant recipe book, IBM Watson is now tackling health care. I read “IBM Announces Deals With Apple, Johnson And Johnson, And Medtronic In Bid To Transform Health Care.” The idea is that smart software in the hands of partners will ameliorate some of the challenges in US health care.
In the tradition of Technology Review, Forbes states:
Experts in health care and information technology agree on the future’s biggest opportunity: the creation of a new computational model that will link together all of the massive computers that now hold medical information. The question remains: who will build it, and how? IBM is today staking its claim to be a major player in creating that cloud, and to use its Watson artificial intelligence – the one that won on the TV game show Jeopardy – to make sense of the flood of medical data that will result. The new effort uses new, innovative systems to keep data secure, IBM executives say, even while allowing software to use them remotely.
The IBM vision is to work with Apple to put Watson in apps. Johnson & Johnson, a household name for many reasons, will use Watson for “personal concierge services.” And heart implant devices will benefit from Watson’s “understanding.”
The technology required to deliver these intermediary services will be Lucene, home grown code, and software acquired via acquisitions. I am confident that IBM will be able to integrate this suite of technology in a way that will add some excitement to health care.
IBM will bring the spirit of the ingredient tamarind to its recipe for health care transformation.The PR effort is more interesting than Watson’s game show performance. Is there post production in medical care? Is a log file kept of medical decisions that deliver interesting outcomes? Who is responsible if the data analysis is different from what the doctor ordered, the nurse practitioner implemented, or the nursing staff delivered?
One can, I assume, ask Watson?
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2015
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