While supercomputing is weaving its way into various avenues of healthcare, the potential for equipping clinicians with access to massive repositories of medical expertise via mobile devices holds perhaps the most potential to sculpt how medicine is practiced in the future.
There is evidence that this manner of clinical decision support on steroids is starting to happen.
Nearly lost amid the big news that IBM’s Watson is turning its attention toward eradicating cancer is the not-so-little fact that an mHealth application is playing a central role in that effort – and the near infinite potential for doctors to access that kind of information if the existing technology becomes more widely available.
The first mHealth app that syncs with Watson, Oncology Expert Advisor (OEA), enables doctors at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to use an iPad at the point of care to determine a unique treatment profile for individual patients based on standards of care, current clinical trials, patient history and family history.
Developed under the concept that “what we know today will not be enough for many patients,” the software, for instance, will gauge evidence within Watson to automatically match patients with clinical trials, said Lynda Chin, MD, scientific director of the Institute for Applied Cancer Science at MD Anderson, in a prepared statement.
[See also: Is mHealth making the EHR obsolete?]
MD Anderson will use OEA across the care continuum as it focuses initially on patients with leukemia to give doctors worldwide access to both Watson’s analytical ability to glean insights from complex data and MD Anderson’s own expertise and resources.
The OEA app is proprietary to MD Anderson, and IBM already has two more mobile apps and a raft of APIs in the works.
Rob High, CTO for IBM's Watson division, said Big Blue is working on similar-yet-separate proprietary projects with healthcare payer WellPoint and provider Memorial Sloan Kettering. In each case the healthcare organization brings its patient records to the table while Watson offers a vast library of medical research articles, journals, and peer reviews. Watson leverages the two streams of data and offers possible treatment regimens.
Each participating organizations owns the patient data, of course, but it's also true that IBM possesses Watson’s medical library. At present, doctors not affiliated with MD Anderson or Sloan Kettering can't access this IBM asset and may not even be aware of the treatment alternatives it can offer. And even among those doctors, it’s currently only available via Apple’s iPad.
High also said to expect APIs to become available for devices other than the iPad, thus paving the way for less expensive mobile devices to tap into Watson’s cognitive services and medical research library as well as its medical expertise.
That’s a good first step. What IBM really needs to do to drive this sophisticated technology toward widespread use, outside the proprietary top-tier technology and healthcare providers, is go after the rest of the market – those real-time operating systems deployed not just on tablets but a range of medical devices that offer lower license fees, lower overhead and smaller memory footprints to keep power consumption down and eventually see the greater profitably in making their devices available to all the solutions out there.
Ephraim Schwartz is a freelance writer based in Burlington, Vt. Schwartz is a recognized mobile expert and columnist, having spent 15 years as Editor-at-Large for InfoWorld, half of them covering the mobile space. Prior to that he was Editor-in-Chief of Laptop Magazine.
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