Dr. Anil Jain
Here at MedCity News, we celebrated the first birthday of IBM Watson Health a little early, during our HIMSS16 preview in late February. In reality, the anniversary is coming up in just a few days, since IBM introduced Watson Health just about a year ago, on April 13, 2015, at the start of HIMSS15.
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IBM has put about $4 billion into Watson Health in the last year. The biggest chunk of that sum was the $2.6 billion allocated in February to acquire Truven Health Analytics.
With that in mind, Dr. Anil Jain, vice president and CMO of Watson Health, spoke at length to MedCity News last week, and we have it here as a 25-minute podcast.
IBM’s Watson supercomputer often is seen as artificial intelligence, but Jain doesn’t particularly like that term. “We think of AI as more of an ‘augmented intelligence,'” Jain said. “It’s the human expertise that helps train the systems.
Indeed, artificial intelligence got a bit of a black eye in the last two weeks, in the form of Microsoft’s failed Tay experiment. (Jain discussed this episode briefly toward the end of our conversation.)
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Jain really perceives Watson as a platform for cognitive computing. He suggested that perhaps clinical decision support might evolve into “cognitive decision support.”
Some other highlights of this podcast:
- 6:15 – How Watson is addressing alert fatigue
- 7:30 – Watson Health as an “ecosystem”
- 9:30 – Watson partnerships
- 12:30 – The next phase of disease management, including personalized medicine
- 15:45 – Benefits of being cloud-based
- 17:15 – What distinguishes Watson Health from competitors, including Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s NantHealth
- 19:30 – How AI and Watson assist therapeutics development
Photo: IBM
