Watson, the "Jeopardy!"-playing computer system, is getting a job.
WellPoint Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. are set to announce a deal on Monday for the health insurer to use the Watson technology, the first time the high-profile project will result in a commercial application.
WellPoint said it plans to use Watson's data-crunching to help suggest treatment options and diagnoses to doctors. It is part of a far broader push in the health industry to incorporate computerized guidance into care, as doctors and hospitals adopt electronic medical records and other digital tools that can record, track and check their work.
For IBM, the agreement with WellPoint could provide some real-world ballast for Watson, which IBM boasts can process about 200 million pages of content in less than three seconds. Watson is part of the company's broader effort to build a large business in the competitive field of business analytics, which uses software to mine huge volumes of data to aid decision-making.
Exact terms of the agreement weren't disclosed, but Steven A. Mills, the IBM senior vice president who oversees its software group, said WellPoint's payments "involve some up front and some over time," and "is something we would see grow over time."
Mr. Mills said the system could be used in settings as varied as call centers and offices doing engineering and scientific work, and he believes the Watson technology carries the potential to grow into a business generating $1 billion of annual revenue.
The first Watson deployment would come early next year with WellPoint nurses who manage complex patient cases and review treatment requests from medical providers. Then the insurer will roll out the technology to a small number of oncology practices, which would likely allow doctors to access it through their own computer systems or tablets. Lori Beer, a WellPoint executive vice president, said the company hopes the service will improve quality of care, which it believes could lower costs.
WellPoint officials said they ultimately want to provide the Watson service more broadly to physicians who treat complicated chronic conditions, and they hope to create an application that could be accessed directly by patients seeking health information.
Researchers have been trying since the 1970s to develop computers that can advise doctors, but the efforts haven't gotten much traction. Now, though, the health industry is under unprecedented pressure to digitize. At the same time, medical providers are increasingly paid based at least partly on quality-of-care measures.
Electronic medical records already often incorporate at least rudimentary "clinical decision support" tools, such as automatic warnings about possible drug interactions. Others integrate more complex versions, like a service from Anvita Health Inc. that can make treatment recommendations and one from Isabel Healthcare Inc. that focuses on suggesting potential diagnoses.
Oncologists said they would like to test a technology like Watson that could take on their most complicated questions. But, they said, it would be important to understand the process and data that led to the recommendations—and to be sure the computer system was programmed to seek out the most effective options, with cost a secondary consideration.
John Glaspy, an oncologist at the University of California, Los Angeles says.
"I would want to make sure Watson was being directed as an objective tool."
Sam Nussbaum, WellPoint's chief medical officer, said the Watson project was "not about limiting care; it's about assuring the right care is given," based on medical evidence.
Watson hasn't yet been used in a real-world health setting. Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Maryland have been helping IBM to select medical data, including textbooks and treatment guidelines, and to help integrate Watson capabilities into electronic medical records. They say they have tested it using thousands of medical-quiz questions.
Herbert Chase, a Columbia professor of clinical medicine who is an IBM consultant, said he tried on Watson a tough case he had experienced as a young doctor: a woman in her thirties with severe muscle weakness, who had blood tests indicating a low level of phosphate and elevated alkaline phosphatase, an enzyme. Watson's top suggestions were hyperparathyroidism and rickets. It also flagged the possibility of a rare form of rickets that is vitamin D resistant—which the woman indeed had.
Dr. Chase said Watson displays excerpts to identify its data sources.
Ms. Beer said it was "too soon to tell" if WellPoint would someday seek to sell Watson-based services to medical providers. It may license WellPoint-developed Watson tools to other Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, she said.
COMMENTARY: When I first saw IBM's 'Watson' the super-computer on the TV game show Jeopardy, I was amazed how rapidly this super computing machine robot could spit out answers to Jeopardy questions. It was a massacre as Watson completely crushed its two game show contestants.
If Watson can succeed in assisting doctors and medical personnel with patient analysis and recommend treatments, this could provide the healthcare industry quite a boost improving the accuracy and response to patient care, and hopefully reduce medical costs, since doctors can work on the treatment much quicker.
In the following video, David Gondek, a software engineer who served on IBM's Watson development team, explains to Engadget's Paul Miller how Watson works. It's in the algorithms, thousands and thousands of them, all firing at the same time, finding the best answer.
CNNMoney reports that Watson was loaded up with more than 200 million pages of text to analyze contextual clues in language, figuring out how certain words correlate.
Dr. John E. Kelly III, the IBM Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research, told Wired magazine.
“We are at a moment where computers and computer technology now have approached humans. We have created a computer system that has the ability to understand natural human language, which is a very difficult thing for computers to do.”
Watson uses 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores, and operates at 80 teraflops on 10 IBM POWER 750 racks, according to Wired. That means that Watson operates at 80 trillion operations per second. Below is an image of Watson.
According to Jeopardy, the grand prize was $1 million, second place was $300,000, and third was $200,000. Jennings and Rutter donated their prizes to charities, and Watson donated the entirety of its prize, according to an IBM press release.
You will find a great link dedicated solely to IBM's Watson the super-computer HERE.
Courtesy of an article dated September 12, 2011 appearing in The Wall Street Journal Health
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