Document Overview

Perspective: IBM's Watson in Healthcare — It's Not Just Jeopardy

Authors:	Judy Hanover, Cynthia Burghard, Scott Lundstrom
Document #	HI233961
Published	March, 2012
Document Type	Perspective
Number of Pages	4

Overview

This IDC Health Insights Perspective discusses IBM's agreement, announced March 22, 2012, with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York to create a decision support solution for cancer diagnosis and treatment. The introduction of Watson in a televised Jeopardy match with human competitors in February 2011 raised excitement among artificial intelligence and technology enthusiasts worldwide. However, while the research was clearly groundbreaking, proposed commercial applications of the technology to healthcare seemed nascent and quite far from adoption by mainstream providers. Over the course of the past year, IBM has pursued multiple use cases for the technology in healthcare, as well as development agreements and collaborations with providers, and these efforts have yielded both technical and professional acceptance by providers. This announcement, as well as progress with existing partner WellPoint Inc., offers evidence that Watson's technology and related advanced analytics constitute promising tools to advance healthcare decision support, analytics, natural language processing (NLP), and predictive modeling efforts. This IDC Health Insights Perspective presents Watson's technology offering and the MSKCC announcement and discusses the potential uses and commercial applications to healthcare, as well as the case for adoption and recognition of the solution by healthcare providers.

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