Cleveland Clinic, a non-profit academic medical center, announced that is teaming with Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant, IBM, to bring the company’s Watson deep question answering technology in to help the center’s clinicians, faculty, and medical students. Watson, which initially became famous for winning on the game show Jeopardy!, can analyze the meaning and context of human language and quickly process information to piece together evidence for answers, according to IBM.
This, IBM says, can help clinicians, nurses, and medical students get answers to tough questions and find out important knowledge faster and in high-pressure situations. Cleveland Clinic is not the first medical center to use Watson. Already, the New York City-based Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) has teamed with IBM to use Watson’s technology to help create a decision support tool will help doctors everywhere create individualized cancer diagnostic and treatment recommendations for their patients based on current evidence.
“Every day, physicians and scientists around the world add more and more information to what I think of as an ever-expanding, global medical library," said C. Martin Harris, M.D., CIO of Cleveland Clinic, said in a statement. “Cleveland Clinic's collaboration with IBM is exciting because it offers us the opportunity to teach Watson to 'think' in ways that have the potential to make it a powerful tool in medicine. Technology like this can allow us to leverage that medical library to help train our students and also find new ways to address the public health challenges we face today."
