IBM Aims to Make Medical Expertise a Commodity
Big Blue thinks its Jeopardy! champion Watson can make money by offering health-care providers new expertise without hiring new staff.
U.S. cancer care is headed for a crisis, warned the American Society of Clinical Oncology in March. Cancer cases are projected to soar 42 percent by 2025 as America’s population ages, but the number of oncologists trained to treat them will grow by only 28 percent. That mismatch is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities in care between the fraction of patients treated by specialists at major academic centers and the many more who get care at community clinics or hospitals, mainly from general oncologists.
Enter a game show champion to save the day.
An attempt to transform cancer care is a major part of IBM’s efforts to make money from its Jeopardy!-winning Watson software. The company aims to offer health-care organizations a cheaper way to improve care by turning oncology expertise into a commodity.
This effort to break humans’ monopoly on cancer expertise is the advance guard of a model that IBM hopes it can eventually roll out across many areas of medicine. It is also the first real test of the company’s claims that Watson can move beyond Jeopardy! and earn money.
[SIZE=+2]80%[/SIZE] Proportion of data that is unstructured, coming from e-mail messages, photos, and doctors' notes
Whether Watson passes the test could be critical to IBM. The company’s revenue has declined for two years as technology’s shift to the cloud has left some of its core products behind. CEO Ginny Rometty’s promise to spend $1 billion on a new business group dedicated to commercializing Watson is just about the only turnaround prospect in sight.
IBM and collaborators are building two versions of Watson trained in oncology. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, is beta-testing a version for lung, colorectal, and breast cancer. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, will use one this summer that advises its new fellows on treatments for leukemia. Both help oncologists decide on a treatment plan by ingesting the patient’s medical records and pairing that information with knowledge from medical journals, textbooks, and treatment guidelines.
IBM Watson?s Plan to End Human Doctors? Monopoly on Medical Know-How | MIT Technology Review
Big Blue thinks its Jeopardy! champion Watson can make money by offering health-care providers new expertise without hiring new staff.
- By Tom Simonite on July 21, 2014
U.S. cancer care is headed for a crisis, warned the American Society of Clinical Oncology in March. Cancer cases are projected to soar 42 percent by 2025 as America’s population ages, but the number of oncologists trained to treat them will grow by only 28 percent. That mismatch is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities in care between the fraction of patients treated by specialists at major academic centers and the many more who get care at community clinics or hospitals, mainly from general oncologists.
Enter a game show champion to save the day.
An attempt to transform cancer care is a major part of IBM’s efforts to make money from its Jeopardy!-winning Watson software. The company aims to offer health-care organizations a cheaper way to improve care by turning oncology expertise into a commodity.
This effort to break humans’ monopoly on cancer expertise is the advance guard of a model that IBM hopes it can eventually roll out across many areas of medicine. It is also the first real test of the company’s claims that Watson can move beyond Jeopardy! and earn money.
[SIZE=+2]80%[/SIZE] Proportion of data that is unstructured, coming from e-mail messages, photos, and doctors' notes
Whether Watson passes the test could be critical to IBM. The company’s revenue has declined for two years as technology’s shift to the cloud has left some of its core products behind. CEO Ginny Rometty’s promise to spend $1 billion on a new business group dedicated to commercializing Watson is just about the only turnaround prospect in sight.
IBM and collaborators are building two versions of Watson trained in oncology. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, is beta-testing a version for lung, colorectal, and breast cancer. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, will use one this summer that advises its new fellows on treatments for leukemia. Both help oncologists decide on a treatment plan by ingesting the patient’s medical records and pairing that information with knowledge from medical journals, textbooks, and treatment guidelines.
IBM Watson?s Plan to End Human Doctors? Monopoly on Medical Know-How | MIT Technology Review
