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I have a friend who is an OB/GYN Oncologist in Indianapolis. Her hospital had IBM Watson Health on campus last year, and she mentioned to me in passing last mo
by imroot 8y ago
I have a friend who is an OB/GYN Oncologist in Indianapolis. Her hospital had IBM Watson Health on campus last year, and she mentioned to me in passing last month that they finally had kicked IBM off of their (learning) university's campus. When I asked her why, she said:
"Often times, Watson would recommend courses of treatment that would be completely incorrect, if not detrimental, to the patient. It became more of a hassle than a learning tool, and since the Residents are operating under my license, it's 'my way or the highway.'"
Hell, I went to an urgent care over the weekend, and they were still using a old IBM e-series application built with COBOL -- and when the doctor was inputting the drugs to prescribe, it warned him about potential interactions between the different drugs -- not something I had seen the EPIC system that my normal doctor uses do.
I still feel that there's a lot of good growth to be had for data scientists in the Health Care field...but, Watson itself is probably not the answer, and IBM should probably get rid of Ginni Rometty and find a new CEO, unless they want to continue cutting IBM down to a skeleton of what it used to be.
- jpfed 8y agoI worked at Epic years ago, but even then it was able to warn about drug interactions. But those warnings were configured on a site-to-site basis; your normal doctor's hospital (or practice) may not have configured drug interaction checks.
- Herodotus38 8y agoNot only that, but if the software at the Urgent Care is that old, it may be raising false flags on things that are no longer considered clinically relevant and just present a hassle for the provider to click through.
- whitexn--g28h 8y agoThe age of the software would not reflect the quality of the data. I'm positive that these alerts are updated with new drugs and contradiction logic continuosly.
- Herodotus38 8y agoYou are right in that the age wouldn't necessarily correlate with quality, but I can speak from first hand knowledge about the inertia that different EMRs bring. A lot of these drug interactions are mild precautions or the evidence changes with time. Ideally what is supposed to happen is a multidisciplinary committee reviews the latest evidence and continuously updates the interactions. What often happens though is that there isn't enough 'oomph' to override a previously established notification so inertia wins. It's often not until a major EMR upgrade where things get more closely looked at and some of the less important flags/notifications get weeded out out. Definitely true that new major interactions get added all the time and usually in a timely fashion. As you can also imagine there is a medico-legal aspect of removing a previous flag, so often it's easier to just leave it and make the provider do an extra unneeded click.
- nwbrown 8y agoIBM's problems predate Rometty becoming CEO.