IBM could be gaining a crucial tool in its effort to turn its Watson artificial-intelligence technology into a valuable source of medical insights.
IBM has said that one of the most valuable applications of Watson, best known for beating human competitors on Jeopardy!, will be its ability to draw practical knowledge from the analysis of massive stores of digital health-care information (see “IBM Aims to Make Medical Expertise a Commodity”). To get one such enormous database, this week IBM announced it is buying a startup called Explorys, which was spun out of the Cleveland Clinic and owns anonymized records pertaining to more than 50 million people. But the company does more than merely hold the records. Explorys CEO Steve McHale says the startup has computing technologies that can mine databases for insights applicable in many areas of health care, from medical research to direct patient care.
Explorys’s technology runs on Hadoop, a data management system that relies on distributed computer clusters and allows for much faster processing and analysis of large, complicated data sets than conventional database systems can handle. The speed was important in the company’s pilot application, a search engine that gave physicians at the Cleveland Clinic a way to find data in medical records. Explorys has since built analytics tools that perform specific functions like identifying risk factors and common gaps in patient care that can lead to bad outcomes.
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