"It's elementary my dear Watson"

Watson will make its debut in the healthcare industry early next year making recommendations to both doctors and patients.  IBM and WellPoint have partnered to bring"evidence-based" medical decision support to you.

What is Watson?  Watson is a super computer powered by a server cluster that has a total processing capacity of 80 teraflops (A teraflop is one trillion operations per second).  

But Watson is more than a machine.  Watson can read using natural language processing and prefers unstructured text.  Watson can learn and reason.  Watson can even play Jeopardy and win.  But that wasn't enough for young Watson.  He is a high achiever and is now learning medicine.  Hmmm...now I am calling Watson "he".  Now that's just like Hal in the movie, "2010".

Last week, I talked about patients who are seeking medical advice from the virtual community, but the average person is poorly informed about medicine and their advice may not be the best.  Is Watson the answer?  Watson could be the real-time consultant physician who can understand the intent of your question and respond with a prioritized list of recommendations for you to consider.  Watson may offer just the type of clinical decision support we have only dreamed of before.  Not only will this benefit the individual patient, but hopefully result in a healthier population overall.

WellPoint (Blue Cross/Blue Shield health plan) will pilot Watson in the clinical setting early next year.  Stay tuned.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/358871/IBM_s_Watson_to_Diagnose_Patients
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/ibm-watson-wellpoint_n_958227.html

Health Innovations are not stagnant

I just want to say that the innovative minds in health IT are not idle.  During a DoD/VA electronic record summit, I heard enough exciting ideas to fill all my blogs for the rest of the semester. it is great to know that people are questioning our very assumptions of how and why doctors interact with patients the way they do.  It sounds like a revolution is around the corner and I want to be part of it.  I'll drop a few crumbs next week. (not for credit)

DoD/VA Health Information Exchange Summit

I attended a fantastic DoD & VA Electronic Health Record and Health Information Exchange summit conference today in DC where several speakers talked about "disruptive" technologies and how mobile devices are the latest development in the electronic health record arena.   A few extolled the value of social tools and crowd sourcing, but others could not grasp it.  I hate to think that our user base missing out on so much if they only had a virtual meeting place.  The VA is doing exciting things in the area of open source and soliciting innovations from creative VA employees and industry.  It's good stuff. (not for credit)

Who needs doctors anyway?

http://www.telytic.com/why-do-you-want-a-smartphone.html 

People will seek medical advice from the virtual community instead of their doctor!  How can this be?  Well, that's what Healthcare IT News reported on Oct 4, 2011.  Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Professor predicts that the 5 most disruptive technologies will hit the medical field in full force and revolutionize the way people seek medical care.  Christensen defines disruptive technology as "cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently, more convenient to use".
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/5-most-disruptive-health-it-innovations.

Leading disruptive technologies in Healthcare

• In-house applications monitor and treat patients within their own home, not in the doctor's office.  This works well for patients with chronic disease that require frequent monitory, such as heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
• Lightweight tools...there's an app for that!  Lots of great apps are on the market for things like nutritional counseling, weight loss or how to treat routine illnesses.
• Health communities make the best of crowd sourcing.   People will take advice from the community instead of going to the doctor.  Just wondering...is that a good thing?
• Mobile content that is easy to find from a mobile device.  People will use their smartphone to learn about an illness instead of asking the doctor.
• e-Commerce will become essential to patient care and require interfacing with payment portals.

A future that is easy and good

http://www.passporthealthusa.com/colorado/index.html

As a medical professional, this future is a bit scary to think that people will follow the most popular trends to treat symptoms instead of getting the right medical care that they need.  And that could lead to bad health outcomes.

http://mhealthwatch.com/

That is why I am pleased to see sites like mHealthWatch that "keep the pulse of the mobile health community".  See http://mhealthwatch.com/  A Seattle-based non-profit offers an app that delivers secure messaging between the patient and doctor to make it easy to get good advice.  This offers the best of both worlds, individualized care and it's easy.

Technology is changing the game in collaborative healthcare

Canto Mobile App for the Epic Electronic Record used
at Kaiser Permanente
 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/epic-canto/id395395172?mt=8

I listened to an Intel Healthcare Innovation webinar yesterday where a panel of three healthcare experts discussed changes in collaborative care.

John Mattison, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Kaiser Permanente envisions a future where the patient record and healthcare itself will be transformed as we adopt a collaborative care model.  We are seeing early culture changes how physicians engage their patients moving towards a time where the patient accepts more responsibility in their own care.

Today, electronic records are focusing on mobile technology like the Canto app for Epic's electronic medical record used at Kaiser Permanente http://www.epic.com/.  The home page is a patient summary screen for the doctor.  Innovations are still needed to help filter the massive amount of information available and to individualize the display for the healthcare team based on the condition of the patient. But how is this collaborative?  How does the patient get involved?  Well, Kaiser's patient portal gives the patient access to his or her own health record anytime so they can stay informed.  But the collaboration comes with the secure messaging feature where the patient can have two-way communication with the healthcare team.  The panel also pushed for incorporating social networking and even gamification into the collaborative care model.  This is driving change in the way medicine is being delivered.  Culture changes don't happen overnight, but we can start with small changes that add value and pretty soon we will see visible changes.

Mattison is concerned over the rising cost of healthcare in America and is looking to technology to help reduce it.  Kaiser has already demonstrated cost reduction with a rise in virtual care outside the walls of the hospital or clinic, especially for the chronically ill population.  Mobile technology holds the promise to reduce the overall cost of healthcare.

Medicine may be changing to a different model and its innovators are looking to technology and social tools to shape a patient-centered collaborative model that will improve health outcomes and cut the overall costs of healthcare.

https://vshow.on24.com/event/35/09/25/rt/1/resources/care_coordination.html