Watson Gets Its First Job

I have blogged about Watson, IBM's supercomputer, in the past.  Well, Watson just got its first job.  It will be put to work at a California hospital, the Los Angeles Times reports.  Watson, of course, is the supercomputer who beat 2 Jeopardy super-champions in mid-February.  It will now help doctors at Cedars-Sinai cancer clinic in Los Angeles stay up-to-date on medical breakthroughs and treatments.  Doctors at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai will be the first to use it.  And they will help IBM "tweak" the computer system as they use it. Watson, about the size of a refrigerator, can process the information from 200 million pages of literature in only 3 seconds so it will be able to quickly help doctors make diagnoses and devise treatment plans.  As Manoj Saxena, general manager of IBM's Watson Solutions unit, said in the Times article, "The hope is that the technology will be able to comb through patient medical histories, medical journals and clinical trials to provide appropriate treatments".  And as Dr. William Audeh, head of the Oschin Institute, said, "I don't see Watson taking the place of a doctor, but I do see it acting as a super library for a doctor". 

The project with the Institute will be funded by WellPoint, parent company of Anthem Blue Cross, which is California's largest for-profit health insurer.  IBM and WellPoint announced an agreement in September to use Watson to create a commercial application that will benefit the insurer's members by helping to improve patient care.  Under the agreement, WellPoint will develop and launch Watson-based solutions and IBM will develop the healthcare technology for Watson on which WellPoint's solutions will run.

According to the Times article, IBM and WellPoint chose Cedars' cancer center because of its reputation in oncology.  As Dr. Harlan Levine, head of WellPoint's Comprehensive Healh Solutions, said, "Cancer care is very complex, and the field is constantly changing".  He hopes that Watson's ability to quickly access the latest cancer research will improve patient outcomes.  

This is certainly a very promising development in the use of Watson in patient care.  I will be following, with interest, how Watson does in its first job.

[And, as an aside, while reading the press release about the agreement between the 2 companies, I now know that Watson was named after IBM's founder, Thomas J. Watson.]