IBM’s Watson supercomputer “can read all of the world’s medical journals in less time than it takes a physician to drink a cup of coffee” notes Jon Gertner from Fast Company. Physicians at Sloan-Kettering in New York have spent the past six months ‘teaching’ treatment guidelines to Watson – soon they’re going to turn it loose on real patients via a cloud-based iPad application. Watson isn’t going to be making a cancer treatment decision per se, but instead will offer up a range of treatment recommendations with levels of confidence. It is still up to the physician o make the ultimate decision.
This isn’t the first time Watson has been employed in a health care setting. Indiana-based Wellpoint a health insurance company has begun using a Watson based computer in one of its data centers to authorize medical procedures, a process that has been sped up thanks to the processing power of the Jeopardy champ!
All of this is well and good – but what does this mean for the future. Are we as physicians going to be beholden to the ‘recommendations’ of a computer and face reprisal if we don’t follow them. Not so says Mark Kris, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York noting that “Watson could provide any doctor anywhere with the world’s best second opinion.” In the end it is up to us how we use technology to its fullest extent. Now Watson, can I have that in the form of a question?
