It's going to help medical professionals diagnose and sort out treatment options for complicated health issues.
Watson appeared on the game show “Jeopardy” in February, defeating two human champs in a three-day match.
Now, IBM is looking to apply Watson in its first commercial endeavor. IBM announced on Monday it is partnering with WellPoint, a large health insurance plan provider with around 34 million subscribers.
IBM has been working on Watson for more than six years. In less than three seconds, Watson can sift through 200 million pages of data and provide a response.
Even more importantly, its computing system strives to understand language as humans naturally speak it – taking into account subtleties, irony and words with multiple meanings – making it easier to process, compute, and spit out information that is timely and usable.
Watson studies questions while considering a number of factors, from straightforward keyword matching to more complex aspects like homonyms and paraphrasing.
WellPoint will begin distributing the Watson technology in small clinical pilot tests in early 2012.
Dr. Sam Nussbaum, WellPoint's chief medical officer, said in a statement to CNN Money, “Imagine having the ability to take in all the information around a patient's medical care -- symptoms, findings, patient interviews and diagnostic studies. Then, imagine using Watson analytic capabilities to consider all of the prior cases, the state-of-the-art clinical knowledge in the medical literature and clinical best practices to help a physician advance a diagnosis and guide a course of treatment.”
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