IBM Watson supercomputer (Photo : YouTube)
IBM's Watson supercomputer, which was featured on the quiz show Jeopardy, and CVS Pharmacy are teaming up to improve patient care management. The collaboration creates hope to improve the quality of life of patients with long-term medical conditions, while the powerful CPU could also help to predict future chronic diseases. Nonetheless, some organizations have raised concerns such as privacy issues.
This week the tech and pharmaceutical giants announced their partnership, which attempts to provide health care professionals with better data sources related to claims information and health records. It would also provide them with fitness devices.
The Watson program could benefit the health care industry in several ways. They include helping to cut the medical costs of patients with long-term illnesses.
One main objective of the program would be to encourage patients to live a healthier lifestyle. That would include eating healthy foods, exercising regularly, and taking their prescription drugs.
Watson could also help to predict people who would likely develop chronic diseases, and thus prevent medical emergencies, according to Tech Crunch. This would be based on patients' red flag activities.
CVS stated that the partnership will give it a chance to use high-tech that could improve the health care providers' members, according to National Monitor. It could also decrease management costs.
IBM teamed up recently with Bon Appetite magazine to develop the Chef Watson app, which invents new and tasty flavor combinations. One suggestion was caviar and mango.
IBM's Watson was developed in 2011 to answer questions on the long-running quiz show Jeopardy. It defeated some past winners and won a $1 million prize.
Watson has terabytes (1,000 gigabytes) of disk storage,. This gives the machine access to millions of pages of Web content.
