Will Feeding Watson $3 Billion Worth of Healthcare Payment Data Improve its Decisions?
This recent blog post by Ross Koppel and Frank Meissner considers if IBM Watson can really ‘crack’ healthcare, even as it munches on its gourmet diet of $3Bn worth of so called ‘data’.
Their answer is a careful ‘maybe’ .. but they are not going to get you overexcited about instant transformation. Rather they consider the question: “Will the supercomputer’s semiconductors digestion of junk and contradictory information produce digital flatulence or digital decisiveness?”
Here solace is found in Hippocrates who tells us “Life is short and art long, opportunity fleeting, experience delusive, and decision difficult” The answer these authors find in these wise word is, ‘why not give it a shot, nothing is easy in medicine, there may be nuggets to be found’.
