US health insurer WellPoint and IBM
are joining forces to bring the power of analytical computing to
bear on the challenge of improving patient care.
At the heart of the solution is
Watson, one of the most advanced computing systems yet developed by
the technology giant.
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Watson, named after IBM founder
Thomas J Watson, was developed by a team of IBM scientists who set
out to build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to
answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and
confidence.
According to IBM, Watson can sift
through an equivalent of about 1m books or roughly 200m pages of
data, analyse this information and provide precise responses in
less than three seconds. Watson’s deployment for WellPoint is its
first ever commercial application.
The computer system’s role at
WellPoint will be to overcome the almost impossible task physicians
have in keeping track of the immense volume of scientific research
and data that is published.
Medical information is doubling
every five years, said Manoj Saxena, general manager of Watson
Solutions at IBM Software Group.
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By GlobalData“There are breathtaking advances in
medical science and clinical knowledge,” said WellPoint’s chief
medical officer Sam Nussbaum. However, he continued, this clinical
information is not always used in the care of patients.
“Imagine having the ability to take
in all the information around a patient’s medical care – symptoms,
findings, patient interviews and diagnostic studies,” said
Nussbaum.
With Watson’s analytical
capabilities, he explained, it will be possible to consider all of
the prior cases, the state-of-the-art clinical knowledge in the
medical literature and clinical best practices to help physicians
advance a diagnosis and guide a course of treatment.
“We believe this will be an
invaluable resource for our partnering physicians and will
dramatically enhance the quality and effectiveness of medical care
they deliver to our members,” Nussbaum stressed.
WellPoint will begin deploying the
Watson solution in early 2012, working with select physician groups
in clinical pilots.
The US’s largest health insurer
WellPoint has 34m members in its affiliated health plans.
For the technically minded, Watson is made up of a cluster of 90
IBM Power 750 servers and is capable of processing 500 gigabytes of
data per second.
