‘Watson’ Analytics to Being Used to Increase Smartphone, EHR capabilities

I for one thought it was really cool that they developed a computer system that could outperform people on Jeopardy.  I am not ready to have my own robot at home, though that would reduce the housework I would have to do, but I love to see people trying to push their limits, and develop things that have never been done before.  That is exactly what the people at IBM are doing.

The full article can be found here, but here are some of the most amazing things that they are developing based on the “Watson” technology:

IBM has doubled the number of healthcare solution architects and technology specialists working at the Solutions Center, tasking them with helping physicians connect smartphones, tablets and other devices to EMRs while also helping healthcare providers build new solutions for remote patient monitoring.

Meanwhile, more than a quarter (27 percent) of specialists and primary care physicians use a tablet PC or similar device nowadays. As clinicians adopt smart devices at five times the rate of the general population,

Using clinical voice recognition from Nuance Communications and medical terminology management from Health Language, IBM is working to improve the mobile EMR experience through voice recognition and technology that provides understanding of medical text, similar to the way Watson analyzed hundreds of millions of pages of text from books, encyclopedias and periodicals to compete on Jeopardy!

With the rapid adoption of electronic medical records and other health IT applications, the amount of data associated with health care providers in North America is expected to reach close to 14,000 petabytes by 2015.

Now for those of you, like me, that don’t know how much a petabyte is, it is equivalent to 1024 terabytes which is equal to about 13.3 years of HDTV content.  It is incredible how fast this industry is growing.  Information has always been the source of power in healthcare, and now we are in a position to use more, and more accurate, information than ever before.  What is truly incredible is that most of it can be accessed in the palm of your hand.

   

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