IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#231

Post by oblio » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

FredPret wrote: post #110

oblio wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that you're from the US? Those are both people problems. Tech can't solve many people problems, especially something as entrenched as healthcare. Isn't it huge, something like 10% of the US economy?

I thought to myself: no way can this be true. The US generates $21tr a year[1]. How can medical be $2.1tr a year? …turns out, it’s $2.7tr!!! [2] [1]www.tradingeconomics.com [2] https://www.statista.com/study/15826/health-care-and-social-...

Why do you think nobody important (politicians, primarily) is really trying to solve those major healthcare problems?

If politicians are willing to pork and barrel over a random soy farm employing 2000 people, for sure they're not going to throw away, say, 5% of the US GDP and possibly 5% of all employment in the US.

I don't know how you're going to get out of it...

[1] "There were 22 million workers in the health care industry, one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors in the United States that accounts for 14% of all U.S. workers, according to the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey (ACS)."

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/who-are-our-h...

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#232

Post by lotsofpulp » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

colinmhayes wrote: post #213

tryptophan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's happening because hospital corporations love them. Corps can pay less, and since they have a tenth of the education, they order tons of profitable tests, consults, and scans because they don't know otherwise.

This is why insurances are moving toward capitated plans. Instead of paying for services provided health care providers get paid per patient they care for. That way the perverse incentive created by asymmetric information is removed.

I thought it was the opposite, that everything is moving towards value based payment, or at least it seems to be for government funded healthcare:

https://www.chcs.org/its-not-just-risk-why-the-shift-to-valu...

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#233

Post by derwiki » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

ProAm wrote: post #126

civilized wrote: post #2

Who could have seen it coming? IBM created a machine that could win at Jeopardy, not a universal expert or problem solver. Say what you want about Google, but they didn't claim to solve any practical problems by creating AlphaZero.

Google is the next IBM.

60 years of prosperity before the wheels start coming off? Probably

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#234

Post by erosenbe0 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

snarf21 wrote: post #192

chromatin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US at least working at FAANG pays far more than being a GP. Not just FAANG, either. The assertion by grandparent poster that GPs are "astoundingly" well paid is bonkers.

Additionally, a GP has med school plus residency. A Stanford CS grad will start higher than most GPs with only a bachelors degree.

Mediocre GP makes 200k cash in Omaha or any average city and has choice among many employers and systems. Stanford CS represents top talent and moreover does not make 200k cash in Omaha, and can only make the big bucks at a fixed number of entities in fixed locations with fixed hierarchies and systems.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#235

Post by lotsofpulp » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

itg wrote: post #224

goodells wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The midlevels are supported by automatic protocols in Epic (e.g. sepsis, DKA -> put these dozens of orders in with 5 clicks) that physicians decide on and approve. They also rely more heavily on imaging instead of a physical exam and history. When unsure, they can consult a physician, even a specialist. It’s a very polarizing topic in medicine that patients generally aren’t privy to. Especially for resident phys…

I'm having a hard time understanding why they would be bitter. Residency is temporary and a part of the training process. Once completed, doctors will make 2x-3x+ compared to midlevels for the rest of their careers.

Because the future is for doctors to not make 3x compared to them. The mid levels are being used to increase supply of healthcare, using the doctor’s license for liability, in order to reduce the price doctors collect (per unit of time and effort).

Basically, they are watching their expected wealth / purchasing power be reduced.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#236

Post by hintymad » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

Another insult to the injury: they were doing e-commerce with WebSphere Commerce series as early as 1998, yet they could not even go beyond the limited presentation-controller-db tiered architecture, and could never imagine something like shopify.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#237

Post by afandian » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

listenallyall wrote: post #151

Brybry wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American medical system is truly bizarre. I've been to private practices where every day at lunch or near end of day there would be some drug rep with food for all the staff. And a psychiatrist that had stacks of free samples of drugs. Even contact lenses are marketed with free samples.

Everyone talks about the relationship between drug reps and doctors like it's the most incestuous, evil, corrupt thing. How else are doctors, especially those who are 10, 20 years removed from their residency, supposed to learn about new treatments and medicines? Alexa, what is best current treatment for a duodenal ulcer? You think a doctor is going to spend his limited downtime perusing the PDR (which no longer exis…

Is there no continuing training throughout the career of a doctor? And if not, how are they qualified to evaluate the claims of a sales rep?

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#238

Post by telxosser » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

wiz21c wrote: post #24

saxonww wrote: post #14

I really expected that we'd see a change in my lifetime, that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant, with there being some other role for patient interaction, wet work, and data entry (perhaps just nurses). My mom worked for a GP for about 20 years, and it seemed to me that most of what made that guy a doctor was bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things. But GPs often ma…

> bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things My impression is that accompanying a patient is super important, it helps to understand illness, to have a plan in case of more complex treatments, etc. Then my doctor has the ability to know me and gauge my health. She's also very good at probabilities and detecting when something really goes wrong. I'm sure that being able to do that require a lot more than…

What data is being collected on you? Once a year blood test if that even?

I actually suspect it would be trivial to beat my doctor after 5 years of higher frequency full blood panel data collection.

10 full blood panel samples a year, have 20 million people do that for a data set we can do classification on. I think my doctor is kind of out of business then.

Will never happen in my life though with health insurance and health bureaucracy.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#239

Post by tmccrary55 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

Living off those mainframe MIPS bucks...

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#240

Post by spookthesunset » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

thallium205 wrote: post #53

nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

Although small in comparison, they also bought weather underground for a cool billion or so and completely ran it into the ground.

They completely destroyed the iPhone app. It’s been, what, more than a year at least and the new version’s hourly forecast still shows the beginning of the day (1am) even if you look at it at 7pm. So many things about that app that made it great got ripped out.

A shame…