2. Hot: IBM Watson

2. Hot: IBM Watson

IBM seems hell-bent on making its Watson technology into a disruptive force in medicine. Just last week, IBM announced that it was effectively doubling the size of its Watson Health division through the acquisition of Truven Health.

At CES this year, IBM and Medtronic discussed their collaboration to bring Watson technology to diabetes patients.  The two companies are working to create a Watson-enabled app that enables a Medtronic device to continuously gather and analyze data in real-time. The app and device will work in tandem to enable patients to pool the data with their own electronic medical records, insurance information, and even population health data to develop a network of information that can optimize patient care through advanced analytic models.

To be fair, until recently, there had been arguably more hype about the potential of IBM's Watson than there has been evidence of its power to be a disruptive force in medicine. But the technology is always improving from a hardware perspective. IBM's knowledge of healthcare is quickly growing more sophisticated, too, as the amount of data that IBM is feeding it grows. One of the first areas that Watson will target is tackling inefficiency in healthcare, identifying ineffective treatments for hospitals and insurance companies. Ultimately, the technology could become important in the field of diagnostics as well, and IBM is currently training the AI to become a cancer specialist. Already in 2013, Wired UK observed that Watson was already better at diagnosing some cancers than humans. IBM is now working on upgrading its capabilities at cancer detection. In the future, Watson may be used as a diagnostic tool to help physicians diagnose and triage patients.   

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