IBM Watson Health

In 2014 , IBM formed the IBM Watson Group division, created to commercialize Watson's cognitive computing technologies . As one of the most priority areas where these technologies could be used, the company identified healthcare, highlighting here primarily the direction of oncology.

Due to the high priority of health care for itself as a market, IBM formed another separate division in 2015 - IBM Watson Health, headquartered in the Boston, Massachusetts area. It became the first vertically organized business unit at IBM. According to the company's plans, in the future, about 2 thousand employees should be involved in this unit.

To advance analytical technologies in healthcare, IBM also acquired Explorys and Phytel. Another acquisition was Merge Healthcare, which develops solutions for the collection, archiving, viewing and transmission of medical images. Based on Watson Health solutions, the IBM Watson Health Medical Imaging Collaborative has been launched.

Watson Health Solutions

• Watson for Oncology is a key solution in Watson Health's technology line. It is able to study the patient's medical history, records and comments of doctors, watch the latest studies on this topic and offer diagnoses based on all the data studied. At the same time, the information is not just summarized: IBM Watson analyzes the data in detail, compares various factors and draws analogies.

• Watson Discovery Advisor for Life Sciences. This technology, according to IBM, should help researchers accelerate scientific breakthroughs, helping them identify analogies and relationships between data from various sources.

• Watson for Clinical Trial Matching. Allows you to narrow the range of all possible studies and quickly determine potential matches.

• Cúram. Applications for automating government social security programs, the original developer of which was the Irish company Curam Software, acquired by IBM in 2011.

• The portfolio also has solutions from Genomics Advisor (genomic research advisor), Engagement Advisor (engagement advisor) to transform patient experience, and a number of others.

Watson Health technologies are available as a service through the Watson Health Cloud platform, the launch of which IBM announced in April 2015. It is intended for doctors, researchers, insurance agents and various companies that specialize in beauty and health solutions. The platform provides safe access to personalized analytical conclusions and a more complete picture of factors that can affect people's health.

Non-U.S. usability

IBM's global cloud infrastructure allows Watson Health instances to be placed locally in different countries if it is so convenient for the customer or it is required to ensure compliance with local laws, the company notes.

Robert Merkel, vice president of IBM Watson in the field of health, in September 2015, during a speech at a conference in Moscow, said that outside the United States, Watson Health is used, for example, in a number of organizations in Thailand and South America. In this case - in English, since most people who work with the system speak English. If questions arise with interpretation, doctors seek help from colleagues with a higher level of knowledge of the language.

Merkel noted that IBM is trying to sell the Watson system as it is, but a localization model for individual components of the system is also possible. As an example, he cited Watson Explorer, a solution that allows you to analyze content and highlight information from many sources. It knows how to work, including with the Russian language, said Robert Merkel. Another solution, Discovery Advisor, works with a database that contains more than 40 million research documents, including sources in Russian.

IBM Watson Vice President of Health Robert Merkel sees great potential for using Watson in Russia

Watson Health in Russia

2016: Russian doctors test IBM Watson Health

IBM has provided test access to the Watson supercomputer to leading specialists from a number of medical institutions in Russia so that they can assess the quality of the recommendations based on the analysis of the patient records it provides. This was announced in March 2016 by the general director of IBM in Russia and the CIS , Andrei Filatov.

In which institutions, Filatov preferred not to specify, explaining that his company conducts experienced cooperation in this case with doctors personally, and not with institutions as legal entities. He added that we are talking about doctors both from commercial clinics conducting research activities and from state medical institutions.

In test mode, doctors use Watson mainly to obtain recommendations for the treatment of patients with cancer, Andrei Filatov told TAdviser. Doctors fill out patient cards in special forms and, with the help of IBM employees, send these forms to Watson. Filatov noted that the patient data in Watson comes in depersonified form. Doctors will be able to evaluate the results obtained for compliance with expectations.

The CEO of IBM in Russia and the CIS told TAdviser that after IBM receives the first results of test use, the conclusion of experts, the company will think about how to develop this direction in a commercial way in Russia. He calls legislative and regulatory regulation in the field of health care a priority complexity along this path.

As elsewhere, healthcare in Russia is very tightly regulated. There are regulations that all medical institutions are obliged to follow. For example, it is clearly spelled out which diagnostic equipment can be used, which can be used when prescribing procedures, and in fact, the principle "what is not allowed is prohibited" applies here. Therefore, without permits and the corresponding changes that the regulator , the Ministry of Health, must make, there can be no talk of any industrial use of Watson, "said Andrei Filatov.

IBM is now actively working with local regulators to use Watson in healthcare in different countries, and the company plans to then apply the experience gained in these countries in Russia.

IBM began to create the ground for the use of Watson in Russian healthcare even earlier. So, in the summer of 2015, it announced the conclusion of a memorandum of cooperation with the First Oncological Scientific and Consulting Center (PONCC), a Skolkovo resident startup . It is dedicated to promoting innovations for healthcare, mainly in the field of oncology. IBM says the startup's specialists are also working with Watson using Russian methodology.

2015

Localization of Watson for Oncology in Russia

In September 2015, IBM representatives spoke about the possibilities of localizing Watson for Oncology in Russia. Pavel Shklyudov, leader of the public sector, a division of Reasonable Planet, IBM in Russia and the CIS, noted that in Russia you can, following world experience, use the English version of the solution or create your own system in Russia.

IBM estimated that in order to fully adapt the solution, a total of about 50 classes of various works would be required, which would require significant financial and time costs.

One of the options for localizing Watson for Oncology may be its component adaptation to Russian reality. To do this, you can separately localize such functions as:

• Analysis of electronic medical records: the system can highlight patient attributes in the cards, identify risk groups, generate follow-up protocols.;
• Treatment protocols: preparation of individual patient parameters with accepted treatment protocols;
• Evidence base used during decision-making: search in more than 300 medical knowledge bases, including the internal bases of the organization itself, as well as external ones (for example, clinical trials);
• Watson Scoring: Granting treatment options and ranking them according to the individual characteristics of the patient;
• Recommendations that are handed out to the patient, according to the country-specific availability of treatments and their availability to the patient.

The easiest to adapt, according to Russia a IBM and CIS spokesman, is the function of analyzing electronic medical records. Speaking about the possibilities of applying this component, Pavel Shklyudov noted its use in screening programs for the population, for identifying risk groups and planning work with these groups, improved forecasting of the need for qualifications and tools for treatment, medical knowledge management, and for preparing the data necessary for the full functioning of Watson. According to Shklyudov, the component for analyzing medical records is already fully localized in Russia.

The most difficult components for localization by Watson for Oncology at IBM are Watson scoring and the creation of an evidence base. Scoring is IBM's intellectual property and has a closed loop, so localization work is possible only with the Watson development team as a joint project. In addition, this would require a dedicated team of representatives of the cancer community and technical experts at the state level.

In the case of the evidence base component, it would be necessary to train Watson by connecting it to Russian sources of information and correlating it with international sources. To do this, Pavel Shklyudov notes, a team of knowledge management experts is needed with an understanding of the entire landscape of medical information in Russia.

According to Shklyudov, his company observes interest in the system both in commercial clinics and in the public sector.

"The customer of the system can be at the state level, and we are now working on this issue. True, I cannot disclose details now. It can also be at the level of the largest commercial clinics, and we are also negotiating with them, "he

The representative of IBM in Russia and the CIS also noted that a number of Watson products have been certified and are already used in Russian government agencies. Among them is a product such as Content Analytics, which is part of the Watson Explorer solution and is part of Watson. Regardless of further plans to localize Watson Health, these products can already allow you to view electronic medical records, draw certain conclusions, search for hidden patterns, identify risk groups, understand how de facto work with these risk groups.

Cooperation with PONCC and Skolkovo

In June 2015, IBM, the Skolkovo Foundation and the Skolkovo resident First Oncological Research and Consulting Center (PONCC) signed a memorandum of understanding, within which it is planned to create a single platform for diagnosing and selecting methods of treating cancer. IBM and PONKTs intend to combine the IBM Watson Health system and their OncoFinder cancer therapy effectiveness assessment technology into a single platform. At that time, the option of creating a consortium of two companies and the possibility of opening an office or laboratory on the territory of Skolkovo, which would be engaged in this project, was considered.

Project History

2022: Francisco Partner bought Watson Health

In mid-January 2022, IBM announced the sale of Watson Health Unit to global investment firm Francisco Partners. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Read more here.

2018

IBM Watson Health Executive Change

In October 2018, Deborah DiSanzo left the post of director of IBM Watson Health after a series of failed projects that the division was engaged in. Deborah DiSanzo will remain at IBM, joining the Cognitive Solutions Division (IBM Cognitive Solutions). John Kelly, senior vice president of Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research, has been appointed the new general manager of IBM Watson Health. Read more here.

IBM Watson has proved useless in treating cancer. Dozens of clients quit cancer projects

In August 2018, information appeared that the IBM Watson supercomputer did not meet its expectations. The company actively promoted it as a tool to support medical decision-making, helping oncologists in choosing the optimal therapy regimen, but the latest data show that the platform did not cope with the task. After the appearance of information in the media, dozens of clients withdrew from cancer projects developed in conjunction with IBM Watson Health.

STAT reports that it has accessed reports from internal IBM experts, and their data is disappointing: IBM Watson has often given erroneous recommendations for choosing therapy, and the company's specialists and customers have identified "several examples of unsafe and improper treatment" recommended by a computer.

At the same time, experts do not deny that systems for supporting medical decision-making are extremely necessary for oncologists - they help to navigate the sea of ​ ​ constantly updated information about new methods of therapy and research on new drugs. The supercomputer has significantly accelerated the analysis of whole genomic sequencing, a key factor slowing the development of oncological genomics, according to an IBM report. IBM Watson took 10 minutes to reach conclusions comparable to those obtained by a panel of experts after 160 hours of analysis.

Internal IBM documents show that Watson medical AI developed by the company makes medical errors

However, when IBM Watson was introduced into clinical practice, the results were not so rosy. Internal experts of the company suggest that part of the supercomputer's mistakes are due to its training methods. The fact is that since 2012, IBM Watson has been trained by engineers and oncologists from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York, and they did not use real clinical data from patients for this, but artificially developed cases of malignant conditions. Thus, the supercomputer dealt only with hypothetical patients based on the experience of several specialists without assessing the existing recommendations and evidence base.

According to STAT, the data posted on IBM's website implies further training for IBM Watson - this time using real patient data. It is known that the supercomputer "analyzed several thousand case histories from the archive of the medical center," however, if you estimate the amount of information attributable to each type of neoplasm separately, it turns out that it is not so large - the number of case histories varies from 635 cases of lung cancer to 106 cases of ovarian cancer. To train artificial intelligence in conditions of significant variability of diseases, this is too little.

However, Senior Vice President of IBM Research John Kelly believes that some journalists "distort and ignore the facts" regarding the capabilities of IBM Watson. Watson technology is still used effectively in 230 treatment facilities around the world. Kelly cites the example of Mayo Clinic, where the number of participants in breast cancer research increased by 80% after the introduction of IBM Watson for clinical testing.

In addition, the Department of Veterans Affairs in the United States extended the contract with IBM to use Watson for genomics research, thanks to which the platform gained access to the data of 3,000 more cancer patients.

Kelly declined to comment further, however, pointed out that doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center encourage Watson's use as a medical decision support tool and remain enthusiastic about the future.^[1]

Slimmed-down Watson Health employees blame IBM for takeover collapse

At the end of May 2018, a wave of cuts swept through IBM Watson Health division. The laid off, many of whom were part of the staff of companies previously acquired by IBM, blame the Blue Giant for the collapse of their former firms, IEEE Spectrum reports.

According to data from anonymous users of the website Watching IBM, which monitors the cuts and working conditions at the American corporation, the personnel purge mainly affected employees of Phytel, Explorys and Truven - developers of analytical technologies in the healthcare sector, which IBM bought in 2015 and 2016.

IBM criticized for collapse of absorbed companies in Watson Health division

IBM itself has not released the exact number of Watson Health employees who were cut in May. Several dismissed Phytel engineers told IEEE Spectrum that we are talking about at least 300 people who were previously listed in the three above firms.^[2]

According to the interlocutors of the publication, Phytel employees were happy to join IBM and had high hopes for the new owner. However, expectations were not met: due to mismanagement, almost nothing remained of the firm.

Phytel was a really good, strong company. Many who fell under the reduction are very disappointed, since they helped create the company and hoped that IBM would help it move to the next level, and not destroy it in three years, "said one of the ex-IBM employees, who asked not to disclose his name so as not to lose severance pay.

The fired engineers complained that as of June 2018, Phytel had only about 80 customers left, while at the time of IBM's takeover, their number exceeded 150.

Small competitors literally eat us alive. They are better, more efficient, cheaper. They win our contracts, take away our clients, achieve more in the field of artificial intelligence, "added the second counterpart.

According to the fired engineers, IBM got rid of about 80% of the Phytel staff, which previously had more than 120 people. The reduction included engineering, technical and sales personnel, as well as a project management team.

These are technical personnel, employees who work directly with customers. That is, it cannot be said that they adjust the administrative staff or dismiss secondary workers, the first interlocutor emphasized.

Former Phytel engineers fear that at this rate, only a backbone capable of supporting only existing products will soon remain from their former firm's Dallas office. According to the ex-employees, IBM demonstrates a departure from the development of products for hospitals, clinics and doctors with its personnel policy, as the staff who avoided layoffs focused on solutions for insurance companies.

IBM spokesman Ian Colley declined to answer IEEE Spectrum questions about Phytel and did not comment on the allegations of the fired engineers. In response to a request from the publication, a representative of the corporation said that the layoffs in the Watson Health division affected only a small number of employees. He also noted that the state adjustment is against the background of IBM's transition to more technological solutions, simplification and automation of processes in order to increase efficiency.

In an effort to focus on high-margin segments of the IT market, IBM continues to reshuffle the team and is actively recruiting staff for new areas important to the company that will provide benefits to customers and IBM itself, said Ian Collie.

In addition, he referred to a May note by Morgan Stanley analysts, in which experts called media reports of massive cuts at IBM Watson Health "misleading" and said that the layoffs were a typical restructuring following the takeover of companies.^[3]

2017

IBM Watson Health in Helsinki

On April 26, 2017, IBM announced the opening of the IBM Watson Health Center in Helsinki. It is expected that this event will contribute to the Finnish health sector in gaining access to Watson cognitive technologies and thereby help improve the health and lifestyle of the country's population.

According to development plans, the center will provide work to 150 consultants in Finland over several years.

IBM Watson Health Ad, (2017)

The hub will bring together public and private healthcare organizations, startups, pharmaceutical companies, small and medium-sized businesses, large corporations, universities and researchers. The center was created as part of a cooperation agreement between the Tekes technology and innovation financing agency and IBM, concluded for five years.

The center focuses on developing medical solutions for several areas:

• Watson Health Imaging,
• Clinical Trial Matching,
• drug delivery system and living systems science,
• API and population health management.

At the initial stage of the center's work, the medical areas on which it will focus will include oncology, genomics and rare disease management. Next, it is planned to create four separate research and development ecosystems in which medical solutions, technologies and applications can be tested before launch. In particular, with their help it will be possible to create virtualization of treatment in a hospital, private clinics, a home environment with remote treatment and in a gym for those who self-medicate (including by receiving data on their own using trackers).

IBM Watson Health Center is officially open for business. We invite customers, startups and developers to join us and jointly develop innovative technologies. As expected, the amount of medical data will double every 73 days until 2020. We propose using Watson's cognitive abilities to cover this data and create insights. This will improve the health care system in Finland and other countries. Mirva Antila, CEO of IBM in Finland

Advancement of intracranial hemorrhage detection software

On March 16, 2017, IBM announced the start of cooperation with the Israeli startup MedyMatch Technology. The latter will open the American partner to access its technologies, which will be used in the cognitive platform IBM Watson to determine intracranial hemorrhage.

In the first phase, the IBM Watson Health unit will promote, through its global partner network, the MedyMatch app designed to detect brain hemorrhage from head injuries or stroke, Reuters news agency reported. Later, companies will work together on the compatibility of their own services and products.

Image showing the work of MedyMatch software to detect intracranial stroke hemorrhage

The original license agreement is for five years. During this time, IBM will pay MedyMatch several million dollars each year in royalties. The more accurate financial component of the transaction was not disclosed.

By March 2017, MedyMatch is conducting a clinical trial of software that, using artificial intelligence technology, is used to assess intracranial hemorrhage and seeks certification from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).^[4]

MedyMatch has developed algorithms using sophisticated in-depth learning, machine vision, patient data and clinical knowledge to computationally visually highlight areas of the brain in which hemorrhage may have occurred. In emergency situations, when brain cells die off rapidly, rapid diagnosis and the start of treatment are very important, in which the development of MedyMatch helps.

MedyMatch is confident that improved data interpretation will lead to better solutions that will achieve better results for patients and reduce medical costs, "said MedyMatch head Gene Saragnese, adding that cooperation with IBM will help use artificial intelligence at the bedside.

2016

Using Watson to treat cancer in IBM employees

In October 2016 IBM , it announced that the company's employees would take part in the treatment program cancer using a proprietary computer system. Watson This one is already artificial intelligence used by various medical centers around the world to fight cancer, but it has never before been used for such purposes against IBM personnel, the publication reports. The Wall Street Journal

Watson's cognitive platform will help cancer-faced IBM workers identify the right treatments and clinical research. The initiative, which will be launched in early 2017, will be able to take advantage of not only the employees of the company themselves, but also their families. The cost of this program for staff has not yet been determined, said Barbara Brickmeier, IBM vice president of benefits and benefits.

IBM treats cancer in employees with Watson supercomputer

First, the service will be available to employees of American offices and IBM enterprises. The company did not disclose the headcount in the United States. Around the world, the corporation employs about 377 thousand people (data as of October 2016). According to Barbara Brickmeier, it is planned that other companies will use the cancer treatment services created on the basis of Watson.

Several services will be added to IBM Watson in 2017. Among them will be one that will allow patients to be selected for clinical research in the field of lung, breast, colon and stomach cancer.

IBM Watson analyzes huge amounts of unstructured data and draws objective conclusions. At the same time, the system studies the latest data on a specific disease. Most often, these are the results of new studies, of which several thousand are produced annually in the field of oncology alone. A person cannot study such a amount of information for use in practice, so a computer comes to the rescue here.^[5]

Creating an Initiative to Promote Solutions in the Visual Medical Diagnostics Market

In June 2016, IBM announced an initiative Watson Health Medical Imaging Collaborative in which cognitive platform-based medical solutions Watson () IBM Watson Health will be promoted in the visual medical diagnostics market. More. here

2015

New Solutions in IBM Watson Health Portfolio

In September 2015, IBM announced the expansion of its solution portfolio with two new services: IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance to facilitate and accelerate certification of life sciences development and IBM Watson Care Manager for patient care.

IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance to certify life sciences developments will help biomedicine companies work more effectively to bring innovative pharmaceutical products to market. The first-in-class solution will help companies accelerate the adoption of infrastructure and applications that meet security standards for the use of IT equipment for medical purposes, while meeting stringent hosting, access, and data sharing requirements.

IBM Watson Care Manager is a solution that combines the functionality of Watson Health, as well as the tools Apple HealthKit and ResearchKit - software platforms developed by Apple to facilitate research through use. smartphones iPhone Watson Care Manager enables medical professionals to assess the impact of a wide range of private factors in the development of patient treatment courses. The goal of the solution is to significantly improve the clinical results of patients.

IBM also announced that Boston Children's Hospital, Columbia University, ICON plc, Sage Bionetworks and Teva Pharmaceuticals will join a group of industry leaders who are already leveraging Watson's capabilities to transform key elements of the ecosystem. health care Among them: search and creation of drugs, individually selected therapy, treatment of chronic diseases, pediatrics and electronic devices for health. The companies will join CVS Health, Medtronic and Yale University. Teva and Sage also announced that Watson Health Cloud is the preferred development platform in their organization.

IBM Watson Health Cloud global headquarters open at Cambridge Life Sciences Centre

Watson Health's international headquarters opened in the fall of 2015 and is located at 75 Binney Street in Kendall Square, Cambridge. It will serve as the main work platform for 700 IBM employees.

For entrepreneurs and start-ups, Watson Health's Cambridge headquarters offers technology, tools and talent to build and launch new products and businesses powered by cloud-based cognitive intelligence. IBM is set to open an interactive Watson Health experiential center in Cambridge: it will be a platform for IBM customers to learn more about Watson's capabilities and how to transform their business. In addition, IBM Research will establish a health research lab at headquarters that will deepen IBM's decades-long commitment to research and report new IBM proposals.

Cambridge is considered the recognized "epicenter" of the life sciences industry, while Massachusetts boasts more than 600 life sciences companies and organizations that employ about 60,000 people with a combined salary of 7 billion dollars a year, according to the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. In recent years, Massachusetts has committed more than 20% of all venture capital investments to national biotechnology companies and to most of the grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Watson Health unit creation: Honey data from Apple devices flocks to IBM

On April 13, 2015, IBM made several statements regarding the U.S. company's plans to implement analytical tools in the health care sector. The Blue Giant is creating a special division, forming partnerships with Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic, and buying two medical software developers.^[6]

IBM's new division is called Watson Health. It will manage a cloud service that will receive medical data from various sources, including fitness trackers, smartphones and smartwatches. Subsequently, this user health information can be shared with doctors and insurance companies to prepare personal health care.

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Health data of iPhone and Apple Watch owners will be transmitted to IBM cloud with their permission

Apple's mobile devices have become part of this ecosystem. The American corporation has connected IBM cloud and analytical technologies to its HealthKit platform, which is a repository of medical data recorded using various applications and gadgets. A similar integration was carried out in the case of ResearchKit, an open set of tools for application developers that allow iPhone users to take part in medical research. Data on the health of iPhone and Apple Watch owners with their permission will be transmitted to the IBM cloud.

The developers of medical devices and services will benefit from this. For example, the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, which became one of the partners of IBM Watson Health, will use this collaboration to create a service that will help patients prepare for surgery and recover from it.

Medical device manufacturer Medtronic, working with the IBM cloud platform, intends to improve its heart implants and develop customized solutions for diabetes patients.

As part of promoting IT in medicine, IBM bought two medical software developers, Explorys and Phytel. The value of transactions is not announced.

Learn more about IBM Watson Health Cloud.

Notes