Introducing IBM Watson Health

IBM Watson is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system constructed by IBM that first rose to fame on the television show Jeopardy. Matched against the top human champions (e.g. Ken Jennings), Watson completely destroyed the competition. It possesses the impressive ability to understand questions posed in natural (everyday) language, and then search for the appropriate answer from its voluminous information database.

There are a myriad of new business opportunities made possible by this technology. One attractive area being explored by IBM is healthcare. The idea is that Watson could use its big brain to analyze health data and provide insights to hospitals, physicians, insurers, researchers, and even patients to make better medical decisions. Watson links together three powerful new technological trends: Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data analytics.

To this end, IBM announced last week that it is creating a new business unit called IBM Watson Health which will employ at least 2000 employees (Fortune) to investigate the application of Watson to the healthcare realm. To facilitate this endeavor IBM announced partnerships with Johnson & Johnson, Apple, and the medical device company Medtronic (Forbes):

"Apple will work to integrate Watson-based apps into its HealthKit and ResearchKit tool systems for developers, which allow the collection of personal health data and the use of such data in clinical trials. Johnson & Johnson, which is one of the largest makers of knee and hip implants, will use Watson to create a personal concierge service to prepare patients for knee surgery and to help them deal with its after effects. Medtronic, the maker of implantable heart devices and diabetes products, will use Watson to create an “internet of things” around its medical gadgets, collecting data both for patients’ personal use and, once it’s anonymized, for understanding how well the devices are working. Initially, the focus is on diabetes."

In addition, IBM Purchased two new companies Explorys, an analytics company that has access to 50 million medical records from U.S. patients, and Phytel, which sells patient management software.

Driving these changes are the impending flood of medical data: "IBM estimates that between electronic medical records, digitized diagnostics, and wearable medical devices, the average person will leave a trail of more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime." The goal of IBM Watson is to make sense of all of this raw information to make the medical infrastructure more efficient, and to provide more enlightened personalized medical care (Figure 1):

"For the first time, IBM Watson Health is creating a more complete and personalized picture of health, powered by cognitive computing. Now individuals are empowered to understand more about their health, while doctors, researchers, and insurers can make better, faster, and more cost-effective decisions."

I believe IBM is making a smart move to enter the healthcare sector in such big way. There will be both challenges and opportunities arising from the massive explosion in medical data triggered by the more widespread use and storage of electronic medical records, as well as the growth in consumer health data collected by wearables like the Apple Watch and activity trackers. We need AI technologies such as IBM Watson to organize the data, look for patterns,  and even recommend appropriate actions.

Figure 1. The homepage for IBM Watson Health (http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/health/)