Insurers Begin Employing IBM’s Supercomputer Watson

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Dr. Watson is accepting new patients. The Watson supercomputer is being offered commercially to doctors and health insurance companies, IBM said this month.

IBM Corp., the health insurer WellPoint Inc. and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced two Watson-based applications – one to help assess treatments for lung cancer and one to help manage health insurance decisions and claims.

Both applications take advantage of the speed, database and language skill the computer demonstrated in defeating the best human “Jeopardy!” players two years ago. IBM said Watson has improved its performance by 240 percent since then.

In both applications, doctors or insurance company workers will access Watson through a tablet or computer. Watson will compare a patient’s medical records to what it has learned and make recommendations in decreasing order of confidence.

In the cancer program, the computer will consider what treatment is most likely to succeed. In the insurance program, it will consider what treatment should be authorized for payment.

Watson – named for IBM founder Thomas Watson – has been trained in medicine through pilot programs at Indianapolis-based WellPoint and at Sloan-Kettering in New York.

Manoj Saxena, an IBM general manager, said the supercomputer has ingested 1,500 lung cancer cases from Sloan-Kettering records, and 2 million pages from journals, textbooks and treatment guidelines.

“Watson is not making the decisions” on treatment or authorization, Saxena said. “It is essentially reducing the effort for doctors and nurses by going through thousands of pages of information for each case.”

The lung cancer program is being adopted by the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and WestMed in New York’s Westchester County. WellPoint is using the insurance application in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Wisconsin.

WellPoint said using Watson should not increase insurance premiums because of savings from waste and errors.