“In a nutshell, what we’re trying to do with Watson Health is enhance expertise,” Kathleen McGroddy Goetz, vice president of IBM Watson Health, said Wednesday during the closing keynote presentation at MedCity CONVERGE in Philadelphia.
“What we’re trying to do with Watson is kind of augment knowledge. We are not trying to replace people,” Goetz continued.
When it comes to healthcare, the supercomputer is meant to be the hub of an ecosystem, according to Goetz. It is the middle layer of what she called “insight as a service”
It is not the same system that famously won on “Jeopardy!” in 2011. In the last four years, Watson has been deconstructed into services and application programming interfaces. “Now we can open it up and build an ecosystem,” Goetz said.
With the advent of genomics, IBM estimated that healthcare IT systems and medical devices will generate 1,100 terabytes of data in the average person’s lifetime, equivalent to 300 million books, Goetz said.
At best, Goetz said, physicians might only have access to 10 percent of an individual’s health data. That leaves 90 percent of “untapped” data generated outside of clinical settings.
“Today, we have a lot of digitized health data but a lot of that data is not very accessible or actionable,” Goetz explained. “Cognitive computing will allow us to unlock the potential of all this data.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
IBM is counting on partners and some of its recent acquisitions to enable Watson to realize its potential. Goetz referred to the April purchases of health IT companies Explorys and Phytel, as well as the 2011 acquisition of Cúram Software, an Irish producer of enterprise management systems. The pending takeover of Merge Healthcare will bring medical images into the world of Watson, Goetz added.
Goetz discussed some of the Watson trials underway with clinical partners, including CVS Health, which is working on improving medication compliance for pharmacy customers. “They see me a heck of a lot more than my doctor sees me,” the IBM executive said of CVS.
She also noted that IBM is working with Mayo Clinic to help patients find suitable research projects to participate in. “It may seem like it’s not that big a deal,” Goetz said, but it can be intimidating for patients to search clinicaltrials.gov for a trial recommended by a physician.
Lately, Watson has been collaborating with medical device-maker Medtronic. “We’re doing a lot of deep work with them around diabetes,” Goetz said. She noted that diabetes outcomes are not getting improving, so better predictive medicine is necessary to prevent “oscillations” of symptoms.
IBM may not succeed in all these endeavors, but the risk-taking is part of the ambitious Watson agenda. “We truly do believe that we’re working on a moon shot,” said Goetz.
