on March 27, 2012 |
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Topics: Clinical Decision Support, Electronic Medical Records Strategy, Information Technology, Natural Language Processing, Emerging and Disruptive Technologies, Speech Recognition, Oncology, Service Lines
Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s Newest Medical Student: IBM Watson
While there is nothing elementary about cancer care, IBM’s famous Watson will be in training as an oncologist at NYC’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The IBM-Sloan-Kettering team hopes that Watson technology, capable of processing large datasets in response to natural language questions, will ideally help clinicians apply evidence-based principles to diagnostics and treatment.
Together, IBM and Sloan-Kettering will “feed” Watson information from medical textbooks, the most recent publications in cancer research, the hospital’s clinical data, and with patients’ permission, individual medical records. As Watson processes more information, the team will test the super computer on increasingly challenging cancer cases. Watson is expected to reduce the growing scientific literature to relevant, actionable information for the treatment of individual patients.
Dr. Larry Norton, the deputy chief for breast cancer programs at Sloan-Kettering, quipped to the Boston Globe, “The capabilities are enormous… and unlike my medical students, Watson doesn't forget anything.” Most impressive to Dr. Norton is Watson’s ability to process natural language in plain text form (physician notes); with this, Watson will contextualize the data to provide better recommendations to physicians.
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Memorial Sloan Kettering's newest medical student: IBM Watson
on May 18, 2010 |
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Topics: Electronic Medical Records Strategy, Information Technology
A new article from the International Journal of Medical Informatics highlights the fact that people and processes, not technology, are the keys to successful EMR implementation. The article describes the experiences of two public hospitals in Australia that deployed the same radiation oncology information system (OIS) in 2003 but achieved very different results.
By 2007, the "successful" hospital was using the OIS for to record all patient histories, examination results, diagnoses, prescribing and approving radiation therapy, tracking disease outcomes, side effects and acute late toxicities. In contrast, the OIS at the other hospital was never fully adopted and was poorly utilizaed by clinicians.
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Case Study Highlights Importance of People to Successful EMR Implementation
on May 6, 2010 |
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Topics: Technology Assessment, Methodologies, Performance Improvement, Meaningful Use, Electronic Medical Records Strategy, Information Technology
A few weeks ago President Obama signed into law the Continuing Extension Act of 2010. It includes a revision to the HITECH Act that will enable physicians practicing in hospital outpatient clinics to collect federal payments for meaningful use of health IT. My colleague Protima Advani, who heads up the Advisory Board's IT Insights practice, wrote the following analysis, which I though you might find of interest:
"This change marked a huge victory for many Washington lobbyists and may have set a precedent for additional amendments to the HITECH Act. In fact, right on the heels of this amendment, several congressional representatives introduced legislation to expand this definition--for the purposes of meaningful use incentives for EHR adoption--to include behavioral health, mental health, and substance abuse treatment professionals and facilities.
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New Law Enables Hospital-Based Physicians to Collect Meaningful Use Payments
