IBM Watson Health is collaborating with Epic and Mayo Clinic to advance patient health by applying the cognitive computing capabilities of Watson to EHRs. As Watson’s capabilities are applied to EHRs, patients and providers benefit from more rapid and thorough analysis of the medical factors that could impact an individual’s health and wellness.
Epic Integration with Watson Details
For Epic, interoperability with Watson will enable these institutions to apply the cognitive capabilities of Watson to these records through secure, cloud-based Watson services, providing greater clinical insight to help personalize healthcare. Epic currently has more than 350 customers and exchanges more than 80 million medical records in the last 12 months, both within and outside the Epic community.
Watson Benefits for Epic
Together, Watson and Epic software could be used to develop patient treatment protocols, personalize patient management for chronic conditions, and intelligently assist doctors and nurses by providing relevant evidence from the worldwide body of medical knowledge, putting new insight into the hands of clinicians. Providers will be able to share patient-specific data with Watson in real time, within workflows, allowing Watson to bring forth critical evidence from medical literature and case studies that are most relevant to the patient’s care.
Epic plans to embed Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities into its advanced decision support offerings through the use of open standards, including Health Level -7 (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Connecting through Epic’s open API, the two systems will extend clinician expertise and help caregivers access knowledge more quickly.
“Accessing Watson’s virtual brainpower from the Epic platform is energizing from a creative standpoint,” said Epic president, Carl Dvorak. “We are bringing another level of cognitive computing and augmented intelligence to mainstream healthcare, to improve safety and outcomes for patients globally.”
Mayo Clinic Leverages Watson for Clinical Trials
IBM and Mayo Clinic are already working together to pioneer cognitive computing in clinical trials matching for cancer patients. Watson’s speed and accuracy allows physicians to enroll patients more quickly in the clinical trials that best meet individual patient needs. Over one million patients are seen at Mayo Clinic each year and more than 1,000 clinical trials are available to match patients to at any given time.
“Patients need answers, and Watson helps provide them quickly and more thoroughly. We are excited by Watson’s potential to efficiently provide clinical trials information at the point of care,” said Dr. Steven Alberts, Mayo Clinic oncologist.
Watson is the first commercially available cognitive computing capability representing a new era in computing. IBM’s new Watson Health Cloud, an open platform allows information to be securely de-identified, shared and combined with a dynamic and constantly growing aggregated view of clinical, health and social research data. With the help of Watson, developers and partners are building apps and services that harness the power of cognitive computing to transform industries, help professionals do their jobs better, and solve important challenges.
IBM Watson has also partnered with specialty practice EMR provider, Modernizing Medicine to build a Watson-powered app called schEMA designed to help dermatologists offer optimized treatment options. Utilizing cognitive computing and natural language processing, schEMA comprehends published healthcare information, such as peer-reviewed medical journals, to enable physicians to ask questions about conditions, treatments and outcomes and get back answers in seconds. Modernizing Medicine was able to build a fully functional prototype in only two weeks with access to Watson.
