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GLOBAL INVESTOR 2.12 — 46 The future of healthcare Watson turns medic More than a year after it won the quiz show, Jeopardy!, IBM’s supercomputer is learning how to help doctors diagnose patients by mining and analyzing the growing volume of healthcare data. The ultimate goal is to deliver better care, lower healthcare costs and to provide a tool suited to exploring medical grand challenges. Jim Giles, writer The IBM Watson computer that won the quiz show, Jeopardy!, could help doctors – already stressed by the vast amounts of information they are expected to consume – to better diagnose patients. Researchers estimate that the volume of medical knowledge doubles every five years. This requires doctors, who are already pressed for time, to spend their evenings and weekends reading medical journals, not to mention the continuing education classes they are required to attend. But despite their massive investment of time and energy, physicians have no guarantee that a patient will present the same symptoms and complications as described in the latest scholarly works and research. No wonder that even the smartest physicians struggle to apply constantly evolving medical knowledge to treat their patients. Watson could help physicians with their data and information dilemma by using content and predictive analytics to “uncover” hidden diagnostic possibilities lurking in the reams of data. The computer can cross-reference patient data and look for most successful treatments, taking drug interactions and medical history into account. Teaching a new dog newer tricks It’s the same skill set that made Watson successful in Jeopardy! – the ability to consider vast volumes of information. In the medical arena, this includes textbooks, medical research and data about patient populations and individuals. The computer is expected to be especially useful in oncology, where physicians struggle to keep up with the massive amounts of genomic and molecular data for each cancer type. It potentially has applications elsewhere, such as in the insurance arena, where the computer could be fed insurance guidelines and patient history to determine whether a request follows company policy. WellPoint, a large US insurer, is testing the system for these purposes. To date, the technology is most advanced in the cancer field, where IBM is working with several US hospitals. Still, the technology is a work in progress. IBM Watson scored 50% on its first test – the Doctor’s Dilemma, a competition for trainee doctors. To improve the technology, Watson is now absorbing tens of thousands of records from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Physicians could use the computer to analyze information about similar patients and conditions, from recent scientific publications or from years of patient records. The computer might suggest the next piece of information needed to resolve a difficult diagnostic ambiguity in a case of atypical symptoms and findings. IBM Watson will never take the place of a physician, and not every healthcare organization needs a powerful solution like this. But most every organization has vast amounts of clinical and business data going untapped. This data, when analyzed and used effectively, could be mined for insight, enabling physicians and hospital administrators to make sense of the enormous amount of data being created from an increasingly instrumented healthcare world. The emergence of new technology to mine and analyze the growing volume of structured and unstructured healthcare data will help deliver better care, lower healthcare costs, and help us explore the great medical challenges
I/8 II/13 III/34 IV/40 Beyond pills V The virtual physician’s assistant The information explosion has made it very difficult for a variety of professionals to keep up, and physicians in particular struggle to maintain their knowledge of the ever-growing field of biomedical science. Increasingly, some are turning to high-powered computers for help. Now doctors are experimenting with IBM’s Watson – the supercomputer that defeated human contestants in the quiz show “Jeopardy!” last year. The idea is to harness Watson’s computational powers so it can serve as a virtual physician’s assistant. Researchers say this may be especially useful in the cancer tial growth in data. Watson Photo: IBM
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