IBM Watson Health Growing Fast

IBM Watson Health last year formally jumped into predictive analytics and has been on a tear ever since, doing deals and partnering with health care providers and commercial enterprises. For years, IBM had a traditional computer infrastructure business in health care. But executives figured out that the combination of its supercomputing Watson technology and the explosion of data would create new opportunities, says Kathy McGroddy Goetz, vice president of partners and solutions for IBM Watson. “We had this idea and decided the timing was right.” IBM Watson launched at the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in 2015. In addition to partnerships with Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Epic, CVS and Medtronic, among others, the company has clinical partnerships with providers and has entered into deals to buy several companies.

IBM Clinical Partnerships in Cancer

• Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is working with IBM to train and codevelop a Watson-powered app to scale the expertise of oncologists, serve as a decision support tool for oncologists worldwide and develop personalized treatment options for cancer patients.
• The Mayo Clinic is using Watson to match patients more quickly with appropriate clinical trials.
• IBM researchers are working with Cleveland Clinic to use IBM Watson technology as a collaborative learning tool in the medical field and to cull new insights from electronic health records.
• IBM is working with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to develop a Watson-powered technology that helps physicians and researchers expand treatment options, match patients with clinical trials and accelerate novel discoveries in the fight against cancer, starting with leukemia.
• Researchers at the New York Genome Center are testing a Watson prototype designed specifically for genomic research as a tool to help oncologists deliver more-personalized care to cancer patients.