Like many new entrants to this vast industry, IBM Watson Health is still trying to figure things out, but the nascent division of Big Blue does have a decided advantage over the average startup.
“Watson Health is only 7 months old, and it has close to 100 million electronic health records, 30 billion images, 100 ecosystem partners,” General Manager Deborah DiSanzo said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune while she was in town for the Radiological Society of North America convention this week. Watson Health launched at the last large-scale health IT event at Chicago’s McCormick Place, HIMSS15 back in April.
Watson, of course, also has the resources of IBM behind it; the parent company paid $1 billion in August to acquire imaging informatics vendor Merge Healthcare, giving the supercomputer the ability to interpret images, not to mention access to many of those records and images generated by Merge clients.
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But the partnerships are what really give Watson its heft, according to DiSanzo, who joined IBM in September after serving as CEO of Philips Healthcare from 2012 to 2014. Oncology is a prime example, DiSanzo said:
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center [in New York] worked with IBM Watson Health to teach Watson the care protocols the center uses. So in a place that does not have the same level of diagnostics that we have in this country, they can use Watson for oncology. It will say, OK, if you have a patient with this type of cancer, here is the care protocol that MSK uses and the best one for your patient at this time.
With MSK, Watson ingested something like 15 million pages of medical content, looked at 200 medical textbooks, read 300 medical journals, along with care pathways from MSK. We have 25 cancer institutes working with us and using Watson for these applications
Healthcare is a perfect industry for Watson to tackle, DiSanzo said, and not just because of the complexity and massive volume of data involved. After all, Watson first made a name for itself by winning a $1 million challenge on “Jeopardy!” in 2011, and the thought processes in healthcare and game shows are similar, she said.
“If you saw Watson on ‘Jeopardy,’ you saw that Watson put up the three most probable answers. Healthcare people said hey, that’s exactly how we think about diagnosing our patients,” DiSanzo explained. That’s a differential diagnosis based on probabilities.
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So what does the future hold for Watson Health? Faster drug discovery, better radiology workflow, speedy genomic analysis and, ideally, improved patient outcomes and population health, DiSanzo said.
