It's been a busy year for Watson Health.
IBM's mHealth-focused artificial intelligence platform has a new HQ in Cambridge, Mass., new partners and new capabilities. But new TV commercials with the likes of Ken Jennings and Bob Dylan aren't going to be enough to convince healthcare providers that this will move the needle on cutting costs and improving outcomes. They'll want proof.
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"It's been interesting and gratifying to hear the interest from people in healthcare and the life sciences space," says Shahram Ebadollahi, vice president of innovations and chief science officer for Watson Health. "We're building a business with a platform that can bring scale with respect to data and multi-modal data across life sciences and the continuum of care. And we're not done."
Ebadollahi will provide an update on Watson Health's past, present and future during his keynote at next month's mHealth Summit. He'll talk about the appointment of former Philips Healthcare CEO Deborah DiSanzo as Watson Health's first-ever general manager, acquisitions of Explorys, Phytel and Merge Healthcare, and ongoing partnerships with the likes of WellTok, Medtronic, Boston Children's Hospital, CVS Health, the Mayo Clinic and Epic, to name just a few.
The idea, says Ebadollahi, is to create a cloud-based platform that offers cognitive and data-driven analytics solutions across a wide spectrum, from cancer care specialists to pharma companies testing out new medications to pediatric specialists trying to find that perfect care plan for their tiniest patients.
Consider some of the ongoing projects. At the Columbia Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York, Watson Health is mining DNA data to develop personalized cancer treatment programs (Columbia is the 16th cancer center to use Watson Genomic Analytics to develop precision medicine platforms). And up the road at Boston Children's, it's helping doctors build out the new OPENPediatrics program, which targets, among other things, rare pediatrics diseases.
In fact, there's no shortage of new ideas for Watson Health to tackle.
"Everyone knows how timely and important this is," Ebadollahi says. "The biggest challenge is speed. It's meeting everyone's expectations."
To that end, he says Watson Health will soon be announcing other partnerships, and building out its platform to welcome third-party developers with innovative ideas for the life sciences and healthcare space. Some of those new partners might even be in the audience during his keynote – and some might not even know it until then.
To which Ebadollahi says, "Welcome."
"This is an open, innovative platform and we're very serious about it," he says.
Ebadollahi is scheduled to deliver his keynote on Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 8:35 a.m. in Potomac Ballroom AB at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center, just outside Washington D.C..
For more information on the mHealth Summit, the HIMSS Connected Health Conference or the co-located CyberSecurity Summit and Population Health Summit, visit here.
