Fast Focus
	WellPoint has launched its first trial of IBM’s Watson, having the supercomputer review cases to decide whether proposed treatment options should be authorized.
	Watson can read and understand 60 million pages of text per second.
	In the future, it is hoped, Watson could help doctors improve treatment for cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Watson and the Amazing Technosavvy Dream Coat

IBM’s supercomputer could change medical care forever.

By  Cheryl Arvidson

Sherlock Holmes had his able assistant, Dr. Watson. Now another Watson is on the case, hoping to assist doctors in unraveling difficult and complex medical mysteries.

This Watson is an IBM supercomputer, capable of reading and understanding a million pages of text in a second and offering up a series of possible treatment options to physicians based on the latest medical research and case studies.

Named after IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson, Watson burst onto the scene in February 2011 in a celebrated man-versus-machine “Jeopardy” competition against the TV game show’s two best-known champions, Ken Jennings, who holds the record for the most consecutive wins, and Brad Rutter, the largest money winner. Now, having crushed its human competition, Watson is moving to the healthcare arena.

WellPoint, the nation’s largest publicly traded health insurer with some 34 million cardholders, has contracted with IBM to harness the technology that powers Watson and use it to better manage its health claims and patient care.

The collaboration with WellPoint is the first commercial application for IBM’s Watson technology. If the collaboration goes as well as IBM researchers hope, it will be the first of many with the potential to revolutionize healthcare, both in the U.S. and around the globe.

“It is becoming recognized that, worldwide, there are serious problems with healthcare as it currently exists,” says Dr. Martin Kohn, the chief medical scientist for IBM research, who is leading the effort to apply Watson’s powers to the healthcare industry. “There are unacceptably high levels of adverse events, redundancy in treatment procedures, problems with access to healthcare that people need, and counterproductive incentives for healthcare providers where the more you do, the more you get paid. We need to fundamentally transform the way healthcare is provided…to an outcome-based care model. All this requires robust analytical tools.”

At some point in the future, Watson may be able to help doctors detect anomalies on MRIs that are too small for the human eye to see and help improve treatment for everything from cancer to heart disease to diabetes. But before you can run, you must walk, so Watson now is essentially an eager young medical student, learning what it takes to digest and understand medical symptoms, complex information and treatment options.

“We’re going through a process of working with IBM and putting the information into the Watson artificial intelligence engine itself—journals, research studies, all the medical data that is out there that we can get access to,” says A. J. Lang, senior vice president of information technology and the CIO of WellPoint. “We call it Watson going to medical school. Watson ingests that information; then, we take real cases that we know the outcome of to help Watson learn to apply the knowledge that we have.”

This second phase, learning what the diagnosis and proper treatment was for real cases, “we internally call our residency program,” Lang said. “That is how we bring Watson to the level of knowledge that is made available to the physicians.”

As Watson’s medical knowledge increases, so will its potential uses in the healthcare system. For now, the system is undergoing a series of pilot projects to demonstrate its capabilities and identify any problems.