The giant American high-tech company IBM announced that is teaming with CVS Health to employ the power of the Watson supercomputer. IBM Watson will help transform the health care management of patients with chronic medical conditions.
The two companies announced a deal to work together on a project with the aim of developing a system able to provide better personalization health care. This would predict health declines for various medical conditions including obesity, diabetes and heart disease, as well as preventing the use of costly and unnecessary interventions.
The chief medical officer for CVS Health, Troyen A. Brennan, declared in an interview that there is no specific timeline or product that has been established yet. However, the first stage of the project will focus on developing intelligent algorithms and test them on helping to improve patient outcomes. Brennan said he hopes that first outcomes of the project could come in a timeframe of one to two years.
Brennan explained that the new cognitive computing approach is still an emerging field and predictions of the outcome are too early to be made. For now, the two companies' joint venture is at the stage "of scientific discovery, not productization."
The chief medical officer for CVS Health added that he envisions the creation of mobile apps to integrate information from fitness trackers and allow the IBM Watson supercomputer to identify when one's activity level drops substantially. This would be used as an indicator to flag that something else is going on. The mobile apps could also act as a virtual adviser for clinic or pharmacy staff and help them identify "early signals" for additional measures needed when interventions may not be working.
Brennan concluded that if the AI system could identify places to intervene this would allow health care professionals to intervene early, therefore helping people to become and stay "healthier and avoid costly outcomes". In order to make these types of systems work it would be necessary to open lines of communication between a patient's physician, clinic staff, and the pharmacist. This dialogue could be facilitated by technology.
The vice president of innovation and chief science officer at Watson Health for IBM, Shahram Ebadollahi, declared at his turn that he hopes that this new partnership will develop future technology that will help create a seamless, integrated system. In such integrated system, every health-care professional encountered by a patient would have access to the tools to make sense of the most up-to-date information about the patient.
