May 31, 2012
By Tom Canty, Vice President and General Manager for Labor, Government and Special Accounts at Empire BlueCross BlueShield
Empire is looking at ways to help health care evolve, and a better, healthier, more efficient and affordable future may be just around the corner. Our parent company is teaming up with IBM to create an original clinical use for their Watson technology. We envision this powerful tool helping physicians identify options in the treatment of our members by providing advanced insights and access to the very latest medical research.
Today, physicians are using electronic patient and medical records to help them better understand the patient’s overall health status. Physicians are also trying to keep up with the overwhelming amount of new medical information and evidence-based research published on a daily basis.
IBM Watson only needs a few seconds to sift through millions of pages of data, analyze it and give confidence-based responses. For complex cases, like cancer, it can provide access to the latest information more quickly. It takes some of the burden of research off our network physicians and allows them to focus on caring for patients. And it has the potential to get people on the road to health that much quicker.
