{"id":19982,"date":"2016-11-18T17:23:46","date_gmt":"2016-11-18T22:23:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/watson-health-the-promise-to-unlock-healthcare-data\/"},"modified":"2016-11-18T17:23:46","modified_gmt":"2016-11-18T22:23:46","slug":"watson-health-the-promise-to-unlock-healthcare-data","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/watson-health-the-promise-to-unlock-healthcare-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Watson Health: The Promise to Unlock Healthcare Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

Healthcare and technology have a strong joint history with seemingly limitless applications at their intersection.[1]<\/a> Yet despite the rise of the first electronic medical record forty years ago, the healthcare world has yet to fully benefit from its digitization.<\/p>\n

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Policy as a Catalyst for Digitization<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2009, Congress passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) to incentivize clinicians to adopt electronic health records (EHRs) and penalize non-users.[2]<\/a> In the 7 years since this ruling, clinicians digitized how they practice medicine and invited the looming presence of computers into their intimate patient interactions, which came at a high cost to clinician satisfaction and productivity.<\/p>\n

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The rise of EHRs has forced clinicians to transform the way they practice medicine, yet many have yet to reap benefits of the data they have painstakingly captured. Today, clinicians are inundated with data from many sources (i.e., updated clinical guidelines, real-time data from wearables or remote monitoring devices, and EHR data), yet struggle to draw insights from this deluge of data, especially when making decisions in real-time. As many EHRs do not have robust analytics capabilities (especially when aggregating multiple datasets), technologists are flocking to healthcare to unlock the next frontier of big data.<\/p>\n

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Hello Healthcare, Says IBM Watson <\/strong><\/p>\n

IBM is one of those companies aiming to make use of all of this data, and Watson Health is the frontrunner in applying artificial intelligence to healthcare data. Watson Health delivers its cognitive computing abilities to \u201ctranslate information into knowledge that can help drive more informed decision-making.\u201d[3]<\/a> Watson Health\u2019s business model addresses three major gaps in the existing healthcare analytics market:<\/p>\n