Dr. Watson Will See You Soon
Jeopardy human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter with host Alex Trebec with their digital competitor, IBM's Watson.
Watson trounced human competitors on the trivia game show Jeopardy this week. Two years from now, it could be an integral part of everyday health care. IBM is working with Nuance Communications to integrate speech recognition technology with the advance artificial intelligence platform to create better health care technology solutions.
The Watson artificial intelligence platform has been the topic of immense curiosity over the last few months leading up to its appearance on “Jeopardy!”. What makes Watson difference from previous attempts at AI is its ability to use inferential logic to recognize nuances and place facts into context to arrive at conclusions independent of predesigned rules.
IBM executives have touted Watson as an example of what’s possible with advance technologies under development. Andrew Monshaw, general manager of IBM’s midmarket channels, told Channelnomices and other channel media outlets that Watson would be a foundation for future products that would find their way into the channel.
The partnership with Nuance is potentially one of the first practical applications of the Watson technology into a commercial product. Nuance – maker of the popular DragonSoft Naturally Speaking voice recognition software – is working with IBM to integrate its technology with Watson for health care applications. This is a potentially huge development … if they can make it work.
Health care technology is hot – every technology company and solution providers is hunting for products and services that make medical operations simpler and more cost effective. It also doesn’t hurt interest in this market segment that the Obama administration is pumping billions of stimulus dollars in health care modernization.
While digitizing the health care industry is a real trend, there’s a downside: lost productivity.
Many solution providers are finding health care organizations and their associated, covered entities are slow or reticent to adopt any technology that impedes productivity, and that includes electronic medical records. In the pen-and-paper analog world, doctors and clinicians can get away with scribbling notes and ordering procedures in an ad hoc fashion, leaving it up to someone else to interpret what they meant and clean up records. In the digital world, they’re forced to complete numerous fields in a particular order before they can close a record. This may improve recordkeeping and quality of service, but it’s slowing down productivity – and that means they see fewer patients and make less money.
By integrating contextual voice recognition technology with electronic medical records, health care recordkeeping systems could independently interpret voice commands given by a physician. This means the doctor could revert to a form of Hippocratic scribbling (a script taught in medical schools around the world, I suspect) to provide accurate recordkeeping, high quality of service and expedited productivity.
Don’t expect to see a holographic Dr. Watson in any emergency room dispensing medication anytime soon. The practical application of this IBM-Nuance integration is in the records. And the delivery of products such as tablet computers and EMR software will be a huge product boom for the channel. This is definitely a development project worth watching. IBM and Nuance expect the first commercially viable products within 18 to 24 months.
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Lawrence M. Walsh is CEO and president of The 2112 Group, a technology business advisory service that specializes in optimizing indirect channels and partner relationships. He’s also the executive director of the Channel Vanguard Council. He is the former publisher of Channel Insider and editor of VARBusiness Magazine. You can reach him at lmwalsh@the2112group.com.
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Larry Walsh:@lmwalsh2112| Channelnomics: @channelnomics
3 Responses to “Dr. Watson Will See You Soon”
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Toronto isn’t a U.S. city? Ah, that’s right. It’s the capital of Canada, which I’m told is a separate, semi-autonomy dominion of the British Empire. (And, yes, I know everything wrong with what I just wrote)
This is an amazing feat with implications throughout all industries, albeit IBM was noble enough to venture into Healthcare first, probably due to the incentives you just outlined. However, I can see the eyes of a hedge fund manager gleaming at the thought of having a Portfolio Manager such as Watson who can make incredibly accurate stock valuations and predictions within seconds. Not to mention its practical approaches within government and deciding on a logical course of action to make policy decisions, without worrying about reelections and underlying political agendas!
However one thing I’m interested in, especially when it comes to healthcare is the ability of the voice recognition software to accurately notate diagnosis given the multitude of accents while minimizing errors. It is someone’s life we are talking about. Nonetheless, it’s going to be interesting to see this technology develop in the near future.
The fact that Watson thought Toronto was a U.S. city should make future diagnosis interesting!
On a serious note, the future of triage and basic checkups could be more effective (in the home) with natural speech.