Siemens getting into population health management by means of a global strategic alliance with IBM and Big Blue’s Watson Health unit.
In news released Tuesday morning, Siemens Healthineers (we still chuckle at that name) and IBM said they would jointly develop technology and services to help healthcare providers operate in value-based environments. This will include analytics, reporting and patient engagement, the two companies said, though they don’t have any specific offerings to announce just yet.
The alliance marks Siemens’ first foray into population health management.
“We will bring the power of Siemens Healthineers’ extensive relationships with providers and our deep domain expertise in clinical workflows, services and digital health technologies to bear to help bring population health management offerings to healthcare providers. The new alliance fits perfectly into the services business of Siemens Healthineers,” Matthias Platsch, head of services at Erlangen, Germany-based Siemens Healthineers, said in a company statement.
The deal is the second big win for IBM Watson Health already this week. Sunday evening, the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” devoted half its show to artificial intelligence. About 12 minutes of that discussed healthcare, particularly cancer care, and Watson took center stage in a glowing segment.
On “60 Minutes,” journalist Charlie Rose gave a detailed history of the supercomputer’s development, starting with the supercomputer’s famous 2011 appearance on “Jeopardy!” While interviewing IBM research chief John Kelly, who’s known as the “Godfather of Watson,” Rose noted that Watson has gone from game shows to searching for cures to cancer in five years.
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Certainly, much of what CBS reported is already known, such as Watson being able to read medical images. This, Rose didn’t say, was courtesy of IBM’s 2015 acquisition of Merge Healthcare.
But Rose brought some new insights by sitting down with cancer researchers who are using Watson and patients who had hoped to benefit. (One patient died from an infection before the show aired, Rose noted.)
“I’m skeptical of nearly any new idea in cancer,” said Dr. Norman Sharpless, director of the University of North Carolina’s Linenberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. But he is bullish on Watson because the supercomputer can process so much information so fast.
“No one has time to read 8,000 new papers a day,” Sharpless said, referencing the amount of new medical literature that gets churned out. He echoed the words of medical informatics pioneer Dr. Larry Weed, who said in the 1960s that the human mind can’t possibly keep up with the pace of change in medicine and recall all information pertinent to a specific patient when it’s most needed.
After being trained to read medical literature, Watson scanned 25 billion papers in about a week, according to Kelly.
Sharpless discussed a trial he ran at UNC to test out the potential of Watson. The IBM system found the same thing as humans in 99 percent of medical cases the UNC team fed it. Plus, in 30 percent of patient Watson found something new that physicians had missed.
Rose asked if Watson was like a physician assistant, or simply a technological tool. “It feels to me like a very comprehensive tool,” Sharpless said.
Photo: “60 Minutes” screengrab
