The supercomputer doctor is in.
Watson, the sophisticated IBM Q-and-A computing system that is best-known for kicking ‘Jeopardy’ champion Ken Jennings‘ butt at the game show in February, has been assigned to help WellPoint health insurance company to treat patients beginning in 2012, IBM and WellPoint announced Monday.
Exact terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but WellPoint is paying “some up front and some over time” to use the technology, an IBM executive told The Wall Street Journal.
The supercomputer, named after IBM’s first president, Thomas J. Watson, will scan patients’ health records and test results, consulting relavent medical science information at incredible speed to help physicians make diagnoses and recommend treatment options in complex cases.
“Imagine having the ability to take in all the information around a patient’s medical care — symptoms, findings, patient interviews and diagnostic studies. Then, imagine using Watson analytic capabilities to consider all of the prior cases, the state-of-the-art clinical knowledge in the medical literature and clinical best practices to help a physician advance a diagnosis and guide a course of treatment,” WellPoint’s Chief Medical Officer Sam Nussbaum in a release posted to the company’s website.
“Watson has tremendous potential for applications that improve the efficiency of care and reduce wait times for diagnosis and treatment by enabling clinicians with access to the best clinical data the moment they need it,” added Manoj Saxena, general manager, Watson Solutions, IBM Software Group.
Watson’s qualifications as a tremendous medical tool includes the fact that it reviews and responds, in three seconds or less, the amount of data equivalent to 1 million books or 200 million pages.
In fact, even in the immediate aftermath of Watson’s victory, it was clear to the system’s creators and other researchers that it would be perfect for the doctor’s office.
As TIME reported in February, IBM, Nuance Communications Inc. and the Columbia University and University of Maryland medical schools, began developing Watson’s medical capabilities.
Of course, there is some apprehension about the idea of Watson working too well and physicians becoming over-reliant on it. As Time noted:
“Some medical professionals…worry that a future Doctor Watson might make us too dependent on technology. A human diagnostician immediately understands that when we say we’ve got stomach pains, we could really be talking about any number of organs in the abdominal area, not just the stomach specifically; computers tend to think more literally. That’s why the IBM team insists that Watson can never supplant doctors completely. Katharine Frase, vice president of industry solutions at IBM Research, envisions a future where a version of Watson can be used to assist doctors in small practices where there may not be a cardiologist or urologist on call.”
Monday’s announcement, too was greeted by some skepticism from physicians, who want to ensure the system would be used to determine the most medically-effective options — as opposed to the most cost-effective.
“I would want to make sure Watson was being directed as an objective tool,” University of California, Los Angeles oncologist John Glaspy told the Wall Street Journal.
