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IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

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

#321

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#322

Post by listenallyall »

austinjp wrote: post #274
listenallyall wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Part of the job, as stipulated by medical regulators around the world, is keeping up-to-date with evidence. This can be achieved by reading journals and attending conferences, in theory. But.... journal publishers exploit their monopolies, and conferences are funded by corporate sponsors. So perhaps they're not so different.

Medical conferences basically would not exist if it wasn't for suppliers and drug companies paying for sponsorships, trade show booths, opportunities to speak, etc. Not really any different than any industry's trade conferences.

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

#323

Post by thomasahle »

jahewson wrote: post #288
rileyphone wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gives me the unpleasant thought of how much value is destroyed and lost in these mindless corporate acquisitions. Incentives are broadly misaligned with what we should want as a society, instead investors want a payday as well as founders, and the acquiring corporation wants a fresh coat of paint and has access to the finance that can make it happen and only hurts 10 years later. In the end promising human efforts ar…

OTOH the average startup is garbage held together with duct tape that naturally falls apart without the founding team who created it. By the time of acquisition it’s usually reached a point of technical debt bankruptcy. This goes hand-in-hand with an over-heated sales team pushing hockey-stick growth that will crash back down when those brand-new customers churn at the next renewal - because the product, while nice-l…

> This goes hand-in-hand with an over-heated sales team pushing hockey-stick growth

This seems like just another argument for limiting startup acquires. Perhaps if a big exit wasn't the goal, the company would focus on more long term viability.

Anyway, I don't think they big companies care as much about whether they destroy value, as long as they destroy a potential competitor.

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

#324

Post by dangrossman »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #312
dangrossman wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped using Softlayer after IBM took over. I still get emails about the daily "incidents" in "IBM Cloud", as well as monthly billing notices for my $0 bill. I don't know my "IBM Id" or "Softlayer Id" to log in any more as it's been almost a decade, so I can't unsubscribe from any of it.

Sounds like a violation of the U.S. CAN SPAM Act.

Relationship messages (like incident reports and bills) aren't typically covered by the CAN SPAM Act, but that law's never stopped anyone anyway. I don't have enough fingers to count the number of daily commercial emails from otherwise respectable US businesses that don't include a mailing address or don't honor opt-out requests. Cold sales mails from tech startups are a big offender...

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

#325

Post by kgin »

user3939382 wrote: post #7

I could be mistaken because it’s been a while, but I read that Watson’s diagnostic capabilities turned out to be mostly marketing and that eventually IBM ended up hiring teams of doctors to process the diagnosis requests that were coming into Watson.

This has real shades of Theranos

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

#326

Post by aunty_helen »

rch wrote: post #297
aunty_helen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve sat in an all hands like that before. Literally 50k$ an hour being wasted listening to some guy we’ll only ever see once talk about his sons 18th birthday. Weird experience.

Yeah, I surround myself with people who have their stuff together but don't feel compelled to go around flexing about it.

To be fair, it was the general manager’s bosses boss. No body was surrounded by him and by the time we were due another visit by this position, he had been promoted on.

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

#327

Post by dvh »

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…

IBM is current record holder for largest number factored of quantum computer using Shor's algorithm: 21. And in 2019 they almost succeeded for 35.

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

#328

Post by jac241 »

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.

If someone was making more than twice as much as you, working half as many hours as you, seeing half as many patients as you, and were less qualified for their similar role, you would be upset too.

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

#329

Post by [deleted] »

HiJon89 wrote: post #160
mnd999 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars are just that, marketing. Tesla for all their hype have limited driver assist only and even Google who seem to have the most advanced offering only works in limited areas in good conditions and the dataset that drives it requires lots of maintenance. The general problem is too hard, and general practice has some of the same problems. Probably less adversarial data, but there’s still litigation to be…

Limited driver assist? Are all the videos of people using Tesla full self-driving on YouTube fake?

[deleted]

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

#330

Post by RHSeeger »

jac241 wrote: post #273
RHSeeger wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that the higher tiers of nurses have at least a masters degree, and like more time working than a doctor spends in residency. They are highly trained/skilled professionals.

I would guess that most people entering NP programs at this point have less than 3 years of work experience as a nurse, a job where you are not diagnosing, coming up with treatment plans, performing procedures or doing any other physician tasks. I don't know if 500hrs of shadowing after a 2yr part-time online only program that you don't need any nursing degree or experience to enter would count as highly trained or s…

I didn't say that nurses have the same medical training as a doctor of medicine; just that they are highly trained professionals with a fair amount of experience. If you match the 3 years of residency with 3 years of working as a nurse (they're clearly not the same thing, but both are "experience" for the purposes of this discussion), a starting medical doctor has 2.5-3 more years of training/school/experience than a nurse practitioner. That's a lot; but it doesn't reduce the fact that the NP has a lot of training. The post I was replying too sounded like it was dismissing the amount of training/experience being a NP takes, and it bothered me.
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