Health questions and collections in libraries are certainly a staple. I think that these links show some interesting trends that might play out over the next few years.
Watson’s medical expertise offered commercially
The Watson supercomputer is graduating from its medical residency and is being offered commercially to doctors and health insurance companies, IBM said Friday.
IBM Corp., the health insurer WellPoint Inc. and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced two Watson-based applications — one to help assess treatments for lung cancer and one to help manage health insurance decisions and claims.
Both applications take advantage of the speed, huge database and language skill the computer demonstrated in defeating the best human “Jeopardy!” players on television two years ago.
Armonk-based IBM said Watson has improved its performance by 240 percent since the “Jeopardy!” win.
In both applications, doctors or insurance company workers will access Watson through a tablet or computer. Watson will quickly compare a patient’s medical records to what it has learned and make several recommendations in decreasing order of confidence.
In the cancer program, the computer will be considering what treatment is most likely to succeed. In the insurance program, it will consider what treatm”ent should be authorized for payment.
Watson — actually named for IBM founder Thomas Watson and not Sherlock Holmes’ friend — has been trained in medicine through pilot programs at Indianapolis-based WellPoint and at Sloan-Kettering in New York.
It also learned “like a medical student,” by being corrected when it was questioned by doctors and came up with wrong answers, Saxena said in an interview.”
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/watsons-medical-expertise-offered-commercially-173205800.html
“The IBM Watson system gained fame by beating human contestants on the television quiz show Jeopardy! almost two years ago. Since that time, Watson has evolved from a first-of-a-kind status, to a commercial cognitive computing system gaining a 240 percent improvement in system performance, and a reduction in the system’s physical requirements by 75 percent and can now be run on a single Power 750 server.
IBM Watson trained in medicine to leverage 1.5 million patient records and 2 million pages of cancer research
IBM Watson has ingested more than 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, two million pages of text from 42 medical journals and clinical trials in the area of oncology research. Watson has the power to sift through 1.5 million patient records representing decades of cancer treatment history, such as medical records and patient outcomes, and provide to physicians evidence based treatment options all in a matter of seconds.
In less than a year, Memorial Sloan-Kettering has immersed Watson in the complexities of cancer and the explosion of genetic research which has set the stage for changing care practices for many cancer patients with highly specialized treatments based on their personal genetic tumor type.
Starting with 1,500 lung cancer cases, Memorial Sloan-Kettering clinicians and analysts are training Watson to extract and interpret physician notes, lab results and clinical research, while sharing its profound expertise and experiences in treating hundreds of thousands of patients with cancer.
“It can take years for the latest developments in oncology to reach all practice settings. The combination of transformational technologies found in Watson with our cancer analytics and decision-making process has the potential to revolutionize the accessibility of information for the treatment of cancer in communities across the country and around the world,” said Craig B.Thompson, M.D., President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “Ultimately, we expect this comprehensive, evidence-based approach will profoundly enhance cancer care by accelerating the dissemination of practice-changing research at an unprecedented pace.””
A Doctor Prescribing More Apps Than Meds: Is This the Future of Healthcare?
| http://www.organicauthority.com/health/apps-before-meds-modern-healthcare.html |
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“Despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act, healthcare in America is far from functional. Aided by doctors, pharmaceutical companies push drugs that merely mask symptoms, and the insurance industry laughs all the way to the bank. New technology, including the ubiquitous smartphone, promises to disrupt this vicious cycle, making medicine cheaper, safer, and more personal.
Dr. Eric Topol is a professor of genomics and endowed chair in innovative medicine at the Scripps Research Institute. After over a decade at the Cleveland Clinic, during which time it achieved a #1 ranking in heart care, Topol started to realize that the centuries-old approach to medicine wasn’t working. Tired of watching his colleagues utilize one-size-fits all medicine, prescribing dangerousdrugs like Vioxx simply because they were the latest craze, he searched for a better way. The answers he found weren’t in stuffy medical journals or a laboratory, but rather in his own pocket. In his book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How The Digital Revolution Will Create Better Healthcare, Topol marvels at the way smartphones facilitate connection, learning, and sharing, while medical technology has remained behind a veil of expensive secrecy. Current-day medicine is designed for groups. It’s expensive and wasteful, blindly prescribing a barrage of tests and procedures without truly taking into account each patient’s history and needs. Thanks to the digital technology we already own, Topol envisions a world where visits to a doctor’s office are few and far between, where the digitization of our entire physical, emotional and even genetic history allows customized diagnoses, and perhaps most importantly, where high-cost treatments are replaced by inexpensive apps we download and use like medicine. In this interview with MSNBC, Topol demonstrates how a device designed for his iPhone allows him to virtually eliminate the formal cardiogram, saving time and his patients thousands of dollars. The prototype device designed by Oklahoma City-based AliveCor has two built-in sensors connected to an app. It allows the doctor to step out from behind the chart, discussing the readings and results almost instantly. Patients with access to similar apps on their smartphones can take their own readings at home while the doctor watches remotely and in real time. They’re comforted by ongoing follow up care without the trouble or cost of an office visit.” Read more: http://www.organicauthority.com/health/apps-before-meds-modern-healthcare.html |
Stephen
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