{"id":507,"date":"2013-11-24T17:07:07","date_gmt":"2013-11-24T06:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=507"},"modified":"2013-11-24T17:07:07","modified_gmt":"2013-11-24T06:07:07","slug":"ibm-watson-in-healthcare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=507","title":{"rendered":"IBM Watson in Healthcare"},"content":{"rendered":"
Source:\u00a0http:\/\/www.ibm.com\/smarterplanet\/global\/share\/19jan2012\/watson_in_healthcare\/?lnk=ussph3.56<\/a><\/div>\n
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PDF:\u00a0SP_Stories_Wellpoint_021312<\/a><\/div>\n
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\"What\"\"<\/div>\n
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Chronic health conditions impact the lives of billions of people around the world each year.<\/p>\n

Chronic illness accounts for approximately 60% of deaths globally each year.<\/p>\n

World population: 6.8 billion. 2 billion people worldwide struggle with chronic illnesses like cancer, heart disease and diabetes.<\/p>\n

Early and accurate diagnosis has the potential to improve patient success rates, but it can be difficult to establish.<\/p>\n

Medical knowledge is growing more quickly than doctors can keep up with.<\/p>\n

In the U.S. alone, up to 15% of medical diagnoses are inaccurate or incomplete.<\/p>\n

Digitized medicine in North America alone will grow 400% by 2015 \u2014reaching a total of 14,000 terabytes of data, or 7,500 times the data in all U.S. libraries combined.<\/p>\n

To give physicians better insight to help improve patient outcomes, WellPoint is pioneering the use of DeepQA technology\u2014otherwise known as IBM Watson\u2014in healthcare.<\/p>\n

Imagine a patient describing her symptoms to a physician who has immediate access to Watson through his laptop.<\/p>\n

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  1. Based on the symptoms described, Watson provides probabilities for five possible diagnoses.<\/li>\n
  2. Watson then considers explicitly absent symptoms to reassess these probabilities.<\/li>\n
  3. Correlating the symptoms with family and patient histories, Watson is able to refine the hypotheses further.<\/li>\n
  4. The process is repeated with a focus on the patient\u2019s current medications.<\/li>\n
  5. Final probabilities are determined, and the physician moves on to testing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Every patient represents a wide spectrum of variables.<\/p>\n

    Symptoms<\/p>\n