According to our analyst Shara Rosen in her new report BioInformatics in IVD: " In February 2013, IBM’s Watson supercomputer graduated from its
medical residency and is being offered commercially to doctors and health
insurance companies. IBM Corp., the
health insurer WellPoint Inc. and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
(MSKCC) announced two Watson-based applications -- one to help diagnose and treat
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.
In both
applications, doctors or insurance company workers will access Watson through a
tablet or computer. Watson will compare a patient's medical records to what it
has learned and make several recommendations (not make a decision) in
decreasing order of confidence.
In the insurance program, it will consider what treatment
should be authorized for payment.
WellPoint is already using the insurance application in Indiana,
Kentucky, Ohio and Wisconsin. It will be selling both applications - at prices
still to be negotiated - and will compensate IBM under a contract between the
two companies.
In the cancer program, the computer will be considering what
treatment is most likely to succeed. The system uses Watson's computational and
natural language processing abilities as well as MSKCC's clinical expertise and
cancer information to create an evidence-based decision support system that
will help doctors create personalized cancer diagnostics and make treatment
recommendations for their patients that are based on current evidence, the
partners said.
The partners have already launched the first application to
help diagnose and treat lung cancer, which will focus on treatment based on
information in MSKCC’s electronic health record, which includes genomic and
molecular information, clinicians' notes and observations, and relevant
published literature.
The lung cancer
program is being adopted by two medical groups, the Maine Center for Cancer
Medicine and WestMed in New York's Westchester County.
Applications for breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers are
in development"
