Interview Opportunity: Watson Technology wins Jeopardy! but can also change our healthcare delivery

 

From: Boyce, Deborah [mailto:Deborah.Boyce@ketchum.com]
Sent: February-22-11 11:29 AM
To: mary.allen@itincanada.ca
Subject: Interview Opportunity: Watson Technology wins Jeopardy! but can also change our healthcare delivery

 

Good morning Mary,

 

On Wednesday, February 16, IBM’s Watson successfully competed against Jeopardy!’s most successful contestants -- Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson represents a breakthrough innovation – a machine that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language – quickly, accurately, and confidently.

Following the culminating victory on Jeopardy!, IBM announced doctors from Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine will work to take the same Jeopardy! playing capabilities of Watson and apply them to medicine in an effort to address some of the healthcare industry’s biggest challenges. IBM also just announced a research agreement with Nuance Communications, Inc. to explore, develop and apply the Watson computing system to healthcare.

We've already seen, in the research work IBM and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology are doing with premature babies in Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children's neonatal intensive care unit, how capturing and analyzing biomedical data can aid physicians' decision-making abilities and impact patient care.
 
Consider these numbers. Primary care physicians spend an average of only 10.7 - 18.7 minutes face-to-face with each patient per visit. Approximately 81% average 5 hours or less per month – or just over an hour a week -- reading medical journals. An estimated 15% of diagnoses are inaccurate or incomplete.*

In today’s healthcare environment, where physicians are often working with limited information and little time, the results can be fragmented care and errors that raise costs and threaten quality. What doctors need is an assistant who can quickly read and understand massive amounts of information and then provide useful suggestions.

Watson’s ability to deal with natural language across a wide collection of diverse information and make it more digestible for humans holds enormous potential to transform healthcare effectiveness, efficiency and patient outcomes.

The Jeopardy! win was not the end, but just the beginning of how technology can transform business and society with application that make sense of loads of data and provides, for example, doctors with a new tool to stay up-to-date on latest information and best practices to help with a decision. A decision that only humans can make, but who now will be armed with an assistant who never tires, or needs to sleep or eat dinner.

Please let me know if you'd like to speak with IBM about this exciting new development and how our healthcare system will benefit from these advances, I can be reached at 416.355.7425.

Thank you,

 

Deborah

Deborah Boyce
Account Executive
+1 416 355 7425

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