Super-powerful computing resources, like IBM’s Watson, and being brought to bear in health care.
New techniques and advanced technologies are bringing radical change to the health care sector, and platforms like cloud computing, social media, big data analytics and mobile devices are creating both tremendous excitement and big fears for those working in the field.
Numerous initiatives to help health care practitioners identify and access the latest medical information about treatments, medications and outcomes — including some amazing advances in individualized medicine based on the utilization of a patient’s own biological and genetic information — are supported driven by some of the tech industry’s biggest companies, including TELUS, CGI Group and IBM, just to name a few.
By applying advanced cognitive computing and big data analytics capabilities, physicians can make evidence-based treatment decisions with speed and confidence, leading to better outcomes and less recidivism for patients.
That’s the goal at any rate, and while taking certain public policy and health care industry issues into account (differences between international public and private health care models; single payer, universal coverage, self-insured and bulk coverage strategies), companies like IBM are seeing short, medium and long term business opportunities in multiple arenas, according to Glenn Gale, a New Brunswick based business development executive with IBM Canada, actively engaged in the company’s National Health Care Strategic Initiative.
He described some key areas of innovation and development that IBM and others are applying to the health care field, and he says he sees some exciting new products and services emerging from those areas in the very near future.
It starts with the cloud, he listed. “What is interesting about this scenario is the benefits to be gained when health care providers make investments in operations, not capital expenditures. The health care provider is no longer required to take on big IT costs in hardware purchases or software licenses. That’s becoming a thing of the past, with cloud infrastructure and enterprise grade computing power bringing as much as a 35 per cent increase in productivity.”
The cloud supports greater data integration and data sharing in order to facilitate and coordinate health care, and so another main imperative that Gale described is analytics, and finding new ways to make use of big data.
The ability to analyze data from multiple sources in real-time is being applied in many sectors already, Gale explained, mentioning retail and transportation among them.
But being able to bring scalable horsepower and apply it to data at a very granular level means health care providers can deliver much more personalized treatment plans, and that is another key imperative. Medical treatment strategies can take into account not just current medical practices and the latest peer reviewed research, but also new data sources such as socio-economics, geographic characteristics and other non-clinical factors that can and do affect health, and applied them right at the bedside.
Computers are being trained to learn and think like a physician.
Gale says the power of big data analytics can bring not just improved treatment and better outcomes, but also an overall reduction in patient re-admission, by supporting personalized medicine and considering individual genetic characteristics as much as broad-based health care policy.
He described a recent IBM project which brought together a Canadian Ministry of Health with the power of analytics and personalized medicine. Ministry officials were concerned about levels of activity at a health care facility, and the fact the facility was so often over-budget. Analysis showed that, rather than being a point of inefficiency or inadequacy in the facility’s workflow, that it in fact was facing higher-than-normal demand from a local population that showed a lower-than-average education level and poor dietary and lifestyle habits.
IBM also sees its technology platforms and consultative services as supporting multi-disciplinary health care teams in new patient-centered programs that are fuelled by big data analytics and a greater understanding of new models for personalized medicine.
There is today a broad spectrum of analytic tools, Gale noted, from simple off-the-shelf reporting tools up to and including Watson.
That’s IBM’s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer, and it is already being used to support clinical diagnostic evaluations and treatments in cancer care and cardiology.
Watson can analyze incredibly large amounts of information, and very quickly: without such power, it can take one to three weeks to interpret a patient’s genomic data, providers cite by way of example. Watson can process the data in split seconds, and present a summary of findings relevant to each case, including treatment options based on accepted guidelines.
Cloud computing, big data analytics and new user centric interfaces are the doctor’s latest tools.
Watson can be programmed and trained to think and learn just like physician, Gale says, and as cognitive computing continues to advance, its capabilities will be applied to other chronic diseases and health care scenarios, and he says exciting new application announcements are expected very soon.
With all his enthusiam for and committments to technology-empowered health care, Gale also anticipates darker clouds on the horizon, and that leads him to describe another key imperative.
“We’ve been very fortunate to date,” he says of the fairly small, but increasingly worrrisome, instances of data loss or network breaches in the health care sector. “There’s been no major breach, but my big fear is that, in the next two or three years, the health care business will be affected, and seriously.”
So security is more and more a major focus of tech solutoins providers working in the health care sector, and Gale adds it should be a proactive vision that addresses data security, not a reactive one. “We should not worry about data losses in retrospect.”
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submitted by Lee Rickwood
