Speaker 1: What is IBM Watson and how is it going to change the future of healthcare? Many experts predict that AI will radically change healthcare in the future. However, this prediction overlooks a crucial detail, which is that AI is currently changing healthcare significantly. IBM Watson, the AI system notorious for defeating Jeopardy. game show champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jettings are currently improving the specifics of healthcare. This article highlights areas where and how IBM Watson AI will save patients and improve healthcare. Why do we need digital transformation in healthcare? The healthcare industry faces various challenges. These include steeply rising costs, privacy concerns, and stringent regulations. However, healthcare professionals are already noticing how the advantages of a digital revolution are significantly transforming the industry. Such changes include 1. Clinical devices are becoming more interlinked, which helps medical professionals to work faster and more efficiently. This allows them to spend more time with their patients and reduce healthcare costs. 2. Clinical IT is migrating towards a more centralized and connected enterprise IT infrastructure. These support the efforts to improve data management, clinical systems integration, and interoperability. Beyond such changes, AI and data analytic tools can also rapidly scan and manage huge healthcare data volumes. The process allows care teams to retrieve patient medical histories faster than before. Combining clinical and enterprise IT networks will help steer a path to increased healthcare interoperability and giving healthcare organizers more tools. Such tools will reduce the time the healthcare organization spends in routine administration and increase patient-centric tasks. IBM Watson Health IBM Watson creates solutions that help create a smarter, more connected healthcare system to assist healthcare providers in delivering better care. IBM healthcare solutions allow organizations to acquire immense efficiency within their operations. They also help organizations collaborate and achieve improved outcomes while integrating with new partners to create a more sustainable, personalized, and patient-centered system fixated on value. How will IBM Watson improve healthcare? Here are the ways the program is not only helping the medical field, but also changing it. 1. Managing Care According to the former Watson Health general manager Deborah DiZanzo, 20% of patients typically consume 80% of total healthcare costs. Such high cost, high need patients require close care managing. IBM Care Manager was meant to assist in managing care more efficiently. The IBM system helps healthcare professionals by sifting through patient data and the latest evidence-based medicine, regulatory requirements, and quality standards. It then allows the medical team to design individualized care plans and recommend the optimal approaches to care. During her tenure, the former boss said that roughly 147,000 patients had their care plans managed with IBM Watson Care Manager's aid. The technology has been useful in behavioral health and social care management. 2. Interpreting Medical Images Previously, IBM purchased Merge Healthcare for the value of $1 billion. The acquisition allowed IBM to access over 30 billion medical images from more than 7,500 clinics and hospitals in the U.S. that previously belonged to Merge. These turned out to be a goldmine for IBM Watson. These images are fed to Watson to help spot crucial information that doctors might miss. IBM will also have the assistance of Deep Learning, a new technology that allows it to spot patterns in data involving vast amounts of information. With all these images and Deep Learning, IBM Watson will be utilized to study and diagnose melanoma, a stubborn form of skin cancer that is hard to spot owing to its varying manifestation in different individuals. For instance, a doctor can upload an image of a recently diagnosed melanoma to Watson, which then adds to the database to be compared with thousands of other images. 3. Accelerating Drug Recovery On average, it takes biotechs and pharmaceutical companies 10 years to introduce a new drug to the market. Sadly, most experimental drugs do not make it to the market. Fortunately, IBM Watson for drug recovery is currently helping accelerate the process. IBM Watson linked the Barrow Neurological Institute, which utilized Watson's AI to rank 1,500 proteins for their predicted association with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS. 8 of the top 10 ranked proteins by IBM Watson proved to be linked to ALS. Surprisingly, 5 of these proteins have never been associated with the disease before. In a nutshell, IBM Watson makes invisible data visible. Even the most brilliant medical researchers struggled to keep up with the sheer volume of new information being generated. The program was built to churn through the fast-growing amount of research data available. Therefore, technology holds tremendous potential to introduce new drugs to the market faster than ever. 4. Treating Rare Forms of Childhood Diseases According to the Global Genes Project, 1 in 10 Americans suffer from rare diseases, half of them being children. Therefore, IBM and Boston's Children's Hospital collaborated in the hopes of utilizing Watson's cognitive platform to assist in identifying, diagnosing, and treating rare pediatric diseases. The partnership was intended to focus on the steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome, a rare form of genetic disease, within children as young as 2 years old. IBM Watson helps nephrology by reading medical literature on the subject and gathering information on mutations for SRNS. Experts from the Boston Hospital then give Watson genomic data from previous patients to improve knowledge of the disease. Aside from the focus Watson places on SRNS, it also analyzes the scientific literature and scientific databases found in the Watson Health Cloud to help generate mutations with other illnesses and discover better ways for doctors to pinpoint treatment options. 5. Identifying Appropriate Cancer Treatments A study was conducted by Manipal Hospitals in India, where IBM Watson for Oncology concurred with the healthcare system's cross-disciplinary tumor broad-recommended treatment approach in the majority percentage of breast cancer cases. AI's real potential is to rapidly evaluate the consistency and overall cancer care quality, freeing up doctors to spend more time delivering appropriate care to cancer patients. The number of healthcare organizations using IBM Watson rose from 1 to 8 from 2015 to 2016. The AI tech is over 99% accurate in identifying the treatment recommended by the Human Tumor Board. IBM Watson can also discover clinically actionable information for patients in studies that human doctors do not identify. IBM Watson also treats cancer patients where doctors are scarce. For instance, in India, where patients far outnumber doctors, getting the necessary treatment can be a monumental task. Fortunately, IBM has partnered with Manipal Hospital to utilize Watson to diagnose and treat cancer throughout Manipal's facilities and academic centers, which treat approximately 200,000 cancer patients yearly. Watson for Oncology uses deep learning to update its database with information continuously. This means it will constantly be learning more about oncology as more journals and textbooks are published. 6. Matching Patients with Clinical Trials The main challenge posed during drug development is identifying which patients meet the criteria required for various clinical trials. It is an especially overwhelming task with cancer drugs, since many cancer immunotherapies are being developed, and even more in preclinical testing, potentially developing human studies. Fortunately, this is where the clinical trial matching system comes into the picture. The system functions to eliminate the need to compare clinical trial enrollment conditions with medical information manually. It utilizes AI to access all this data, matching the suitable patient to the correct clinical study. Watson's CTM utilization has reduced prescreening wait time by over 75% during a typical 16-week trial period. It also eliminates the majority of patients who do not meet clinical trial requirements. It translates to faster enrollments for clinical studies, which ties into accelerating the speed of drugs being introduced into the market. 7. Powering Applications that Give Nutritional Advice The innovations mentioned above are majorly concentrated in hospitals and medical emergency centers. However, there is a way in which IBM Watson is available for patient use in smartphones. IBM introduced the Neutrino app powered in December. This is especially important for pregnant women, who are in constant need of nutritional advice. A collaboration with healthy eating app developer Neutrino Inc., the application is designed to give expectant mothers personalized, science-based, and contextual nutritional advice. The application uses IBM Watson and Neutrino's Insights platform to give personalized advice and meal recommendations throughout the day. 8. Healthcare Transformation and Value-Based Care Healthcare organizations require more precise and accurate information and better data-based management to change value-based care successfully. Fortunately, there are more opportunities to use healthcare tech and data to support decision-making, owing to a large amount of medical, population health, genomic, and performance data. AI and analytics solutions will collect and analyze information from its massive source of info to assist hospitals, healthcare providers, and caregivers learn and apply innovative methods. Key Takeaways IBM Watson's ultimate goal is to democratize access to healthcare. Patients are allowed access to their medical records since healthcare is digitized. It will increase efficiency in offering medical services because with the large amounts of data comprising of previously diagnosed diseases, physicians will quickly diagnose and treat such conditions. Overall, the healthcare industry will experience a huge positive impact from IBM Watson AI.