Ibm Watson Change the Market of Emr

Emerging Technology Report

IBM Watson’s initiative in healthcare IT

1. Introduction

1.1 Technology Description

Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language developed in IBM's DeepQA project [1]. On February 2011, Watson was applied into healthcare industry to be used as a clinical decision support system to aid the diagnosis and treatment of patients. IBM Watson is an advanced technology combining data analysis and electronic medical record. Moreover, Watson is able to discern double meaning of words, puns, rhymes, and inferred hints and process vast amount of information to make complex and subtle logical connections.

Watson in healthcare provides several options with degrees of confidence, along with supporting evidences it used to arrive at the optimal treatment. Besides, Watson in healthcare helps hospitals or clinics gather information. Most importantly, IBM Watson achieves storage, retrieval and analysis of biomedical information to improve healthcare industry. Considering the fact that management diseases is complicated and diagnostic errors account for 20% of medical errors, we suppose IBM Watson will make substantial contribution to accurate diagnosis of ignored disease and decision support.

1.2 Vendor Description

The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) mainly focuses on manufacturing computer hardware, software and offering infrastructure, host and consulting services. IBM provides advanced and superior service in many industries such as banking, healthcare, communication and so on. Also, IBM is a leading company conducting big data and supercomputer. The goal of IBM is to build a smarter world by using technology.

In the technology industry, IBM is one of few companies which have supercomputing capability and cloud computing. IBM's strong and professional background in big data enables Watson to become more efficient and effective.

1.3 IBM Watson main functions in healthcare

IBM Watson can provide following major functions to improve healthcare industry:

1) To find the 1% healthcare or disease information probably ignored by doctors

2) To provide faster and more accurate diagnosis for emergency patients

3) To offer evidence-based decision support for doctors and patient

4) To integrate and aggregate patients' medical records into database in IBM Watson

5) To leverage technology and innovation into a traditional care management process