§The story of Watson’s triumph on the TV game show Jeopardy is well known, but there’s one essential point about it that’s worth highlighting here: the IBM Research team’s breakthrough was in large part due to a willingness to think differently and to combine established technologies in new ways to achieve remarkable results.
§In the effort to find real-world uses for Watson began even before the Jeopardy broadcast in February of 2011. IBM scientists reached out to their counterparts in academia and medicine to explore the possibilities of using Watson in healthcare. Rather than design products in isolation, they partnered with leaders in this industry to create solutions to its problems.
§Leaders in cancer treatment have partnering with IBM to explore the potential of harnessing Watson to help them digest vast amounts of medical information and choose the best-possible treatments for individual patients. Alliances with Memorial Sloan-Kettering, MD Anderson, Cleveland Clinic, the New York Genome Center and healthcare insurance giant WellPoint are producing applications for Watson that are now being tried out in real-world settings. The foray into healthcare established Watson’s bona fides as an able assistant to human experts in solving complex problems.