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Elementary? My dear Watson!

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required for full article) reported today on an agreement between IBM and WellPoint for the latter to use IBM's Watson technology for clinical decision support.

WellPoint Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. are set to announce a deal on Monday for the health insurer to use the Watson technology, the first time the high-profile project will result in a commercial application.

WellPoint said it plans to use Watson's data-crunching to help suggest treatment options and diagnoses to doctors. It is part of a far broader push in the health industry to incorporate computerized guidance into care, as doctors and hospitals adopt electronic medical records and other digital tools that can record, track and check their work.

For IBM, the agreement with WellPoint could provide some real-world ballast for Watson, which IBM boasts can process about 200 million pages of content in less than three seconds. Watson is part of the company's broader effort to build a large business in the competitive field of business analytics, which uses software to mine huge volumes of data to aid decision-making.

This will be an interesting development to follow.  It certainly makes sense to leverage electronic medical records by incorporating data mining systems and clinical support tools to improve patient care.  Yet one thing it does not address is the persistent problems with communication between providers and lack of coordinated care that plague both inpatient and outpatient care.  It's curious that WellPoint plans to first deploy the Watson technology "with nurses who manage complex patient cases and review treatment requests from medical providers" (my emphasis).  I admit I'd be skeptical about the underlying reason (i.e., cost) for a company implementing such a system when framed like this.  I guess I'm unaware that nurses actually manage patients and review doctors treatment "requests."  If that's the case, why do doctors need Watson?  "Researchers have been trying since the 1970s to develop computers that can advise doctors, but the efforts haven't gotten much traction."  Is this suppose to be ironic?  If the joke has to be explained, doesn't it spoil the laugh?

Low expectations for future of clinical data mining--a study

I picked this up from Fierce Health IT newsletter:

Anvita Health commissioned a newly released HIMSS Analytics study on clinical data mining. HIMSS Analytics convened a focus group of CMOs and and CMIOs of provider and payer organizations for the report.

Payers and providers alike generally don't often employ clinical data for real-time decision-making, in part because information is in so many disparate formats, some important data elements are missing and because they believe the costs generally outweigh the benefits. "These challenges are consistent with what we've seen and heard from our payer and provider customers," Noffsinger explains. "Interoperability of data is a hurdle, but it's not insurmountable."

"A key finding for us was that both payers and providers had limited expectations for how clinical analytics could improve the quality of patient care--especially at the point of care--and lower costs through that improved quality," Richard Noffsinger, CEO of San Diego-based data analytics firm Anvita Health, says, Healthcare IT News reports. "Comprehensive real-time analytics can take these stakeholders beyond just evaluation, and provide a blueprint for action by physicians, care managers and others in the care continuum."

One of the promises of the Health Care "Reform" bill rammed through Congress is that (unfunded but mandated) improvements in and use of health care information technology will lead to improved health and lower costs.  What is interesting to me from this study is the "limited expectations" that both payers and providers have for data mining for routine clinical use.  Such low expectations could lead to a "feedforward" feedback on the implementation of health IT creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where low expectations for IT improving quality of care leads to underutilization which fulfills the lower expectations, etc.

Here is the link to Health Data Management which has a link to a pdf of the study.