Health IT

IBM’s Rometty: ‘Cognitive healthcare is mainstream, it’s real and it’s here’

"Competitive advantage in healthcare will not come from digitization," Rometty said. "It's going to come from cognitive." But there must be transparency.

Rometty HIMSS17

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty at HIMSS17

It has been nearly six years since IBM‘s Watson supercomputer won on “Jeopardy!” and just short of two years since the launch of IBM Watson Health. That, in the eyes of Ginni Rometty, chairman, president and CEO of IBM, is enough time for the technology to catch on widely.

“Cognitive healthcare is mainstream, it’s real and it’s here,” Rometty declared Monday during the opening keynote session of HIMSS17 in Orlando, Florida. In fact, Rometty said, this is the beginning of the “cognitive era” in healthcare. It can be a “golden era” if done right.

“Competitive advantage in healthcare will not come from digitization,” Rometty said. “It’s going to come from cognitive.”

But there is an important caveat. “You have to provide transparency,” Rometty said. “We will be clear with you and our clients when a decision is touched by AI, who trained it and what it was trained in.”

Noting that IBM has participated in every U.S. manned space flight in history and that old IBM mainframes appear in the Oscar-nominated film “Hidden Figures,” Rometty made a reference to space travel.

“For IBM, Watson is an opportunity for a moonshot effort to make a difference via the cognitive era,” she said. “We believe in moonshots.”

And she is confident. “Watson Health is that moonshot, and moonshots are made to be landed,” Rometty said.

What she does not believe in is computers completely replacing people, even in high-knowledge pursuits like healthcare, which is why IBM prefers the term “augmented intelligence” to artificial intelligence. “We are here to augment what man does,” Rometty said. “This is not man vs. machine. This is man plus machine.”

She also suggested that healthcare could lead the way in shaping the future of augmented intelligence.

With this in mind, Big Blue on Monday introduced a suite of technologies called IBM Watson Health Value-Based Care Solutions. These products combine the capabilities from three major healthcare acquisitions IBM has made since 2015 — Phytel, Explorys and Truven Health Analytics — with the core Watson Care Manager.

The company also unveiled IBM Watson Imaging Clinical Review, its first cognitive imaging product in healthcare. That technology, previewed at the Radiological Society of North America conference in December, is an outgrowth of IBM’s August 2015 acquisition of Merge Healthcare.

What Watson is doing, Rometty said, is helping to make sense of images and unstructured data.

She said that 90 percent of the data in medicine in the form of images. Plus, “80 percent of the data in the world is not searchable on the web,” Rometty said. “That’s where your insights are going to come from.”

Photo: Twitter user Wayne Craige

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