IBM, in conjunction with the Cleveland Clinic, has developed two new artificial intelligences to improve medicine: WatsonPaths and Watson EMR Assistant. These tools are a major advancement in the use of artificial intelligence in the medical field.
WatsonPaths
The WatsonPaths tool is intended to review complex data and draw conclusions. Watson can recommend questions doctors should ask to narrow down the range of possible diagnoses. WatsonPaths pulls in information from recent clinical trials and papers to give treatment recommendations to doctors, ensuring that doctors provide care based on the latest medical advancements whether or not they’ve had the time to keep up.WatsonPaths improves the interaction between doctors and their data. It generates charts, graphs and infographics so doctors better understand all of the information they have.
Watson and the Medical Suite
Watson Paths is intended to act as a guide for problem solving and assigning probabilities to say which diagnoses are the most and least likely. However, the computer is only a guide. Doctors still make the final say, and can correct Watson. WatsonPaths is expected to improve over time because it records the decisions made by doctors and “learns” from these corrections.
Watson EMR Assistant
Electronic medical records are currently a crowded marketplace. There are many EMR systems, each with their own data structure. In addition, there are differences in how data is collected, recorded and organized within each application. This complexity is compounded by discrepancies in how organizations take in and process data.
The data inside of EMRs is needed to make decisions, but doctors themselves may be overwhelmed trying to read all of the files and make sense of the confusion.
Watson used natural language expertise to win Jeopardy. The Watson EMR Assistant uses this same functionality to process medical notes and information within a patient’s EMR to turn it into a single, usable data set
Watson EMR Assistant can help doctors visualize information, collate medical information from different sources and reference data from labs and specialists while treating the patient. Important information from a five-year-old file isn’t lost when it is given equal priority by Watson EMR Assistant, while doctors naturally prefer to skim the top pages of a patient’s file.
Future Uses
This new technology could go through electronic medical records and generate reports for commonly missing fields. Watson could also be used to flag likely cases of fraud after studying the medical records of known prescription drug addicts, false disability claims and doctors billing for services not actually performed. Watson has much to learn before showing up in doctors’ offices around the country. However, if Watson does as well decoding medical puzzles as he does trivia and the spoken word, doctors will have a powerful new ally.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
