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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

#361

Post by flipchart »

nradclif wrote: post #197
cube00 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But GPs often make astounding amounts of money while leaning heavily on their staff to actually handle patients and keep the business running. The private ones might the ones in the public system at least in my country need to see a patient every 10 minutes to keep their heads above water.

What country are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?

I've heard Canada is like that. I've had similar experience in South Africa, even in private health care, but I definitely had the impression that my doctor somewhat cared about me, especially after going to them for a few years

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

#362

Post by lokar »

mbreese wrote: post #304
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is airline booking software very complex? I don’t see why that software would necessitate the updating of k8s.

I’m not sure about the architecture, but airline booking is very complex. You basically need to support a traveling salesman algorithm. It’s also one of the original use cases for large scale computers. The Sabre airline booking program dates back to the 60’s so it’s also very legacy. The Arstechnica article (below) has a good history of the original military program and how it helped to spin out airline booking. Mod…

I recall talking to people who worked at a company that competed w/ Sabere/IBM

There was a project they did not want to do. To avoid saying "no" and risking the relationship they quoted what they thought was an outrageous price, expecting to loose. The customer said yes. They had underestimated how much IBM had been gouging them for so long.

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

#363

Post by axiosgunnar »

jjeaff wrote: post #298
axiosgunnar wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In civilised lands the loser has to reimburse the winner's legal costs, so at no cost. If you don't live in civilised lands, well you have other problems.

I'm not sure that is as civilized as you think it is. Loser pays discourages any small company or individual from suing because the cost is too great if they lose.

But the thread here was talking about a slum dunk case of contract breach.

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

#364

Post by tomrod »

AlexandrB wrote: post #267
shane_b wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently they have one of the only if not the only enterprise permissioned blockchain project called fabric and it’s open source. I could see them making a comeback with crypto but not the way we think about it today. Instead, inter-enterprise operations infrastructure.

What is the use case for this technology? If it's permissioned, it might as well be a normal database with the "append-only" setting enabled.

Federated, hashed data stores in zero-trust environments is one (though this isn't the best or only way to approach it, and blockchain is almost always unneeded), where you don't want to share the underlying data but want to provide enough information to support reporting requirements. Public health, taxation, etc. come to mind.

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

#365

Post by derefr »

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…

“Super important” — more like “super nice-to-have.” Hospitals don’t have any single person on staff who stays attached to particular in-patients. Who knows you? Your chart.

Yes, of course, hospital care would be better in many ways if we did have somebody who statefully understood particular patients’ needs.

But what I’m saying is, the GPs in hospitals could be replaced with stateless diagnostic AI without making hospital care any worse than it is now. And hospital care is a large part of the medical system, so only replacing diagnostics there (while leaving primary-care GPs alone) would still be a major optimization, freeing many doctors to provide better care, go into specialties, etc.

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

#366

Post by sangnoir »

kitd wrote: post #293
wussboy wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent 10 years at a small (<80 people) CX company that was full of intelligent, motivated employees. We were smart and quick and lean and did very good work. But we never dragged in big deals because no one at the company had that swagger/access to high-levels. The scenario you describe is dumb and ruinous and, unfortunately, true.

Big corps tend not to do deals with small corps. They don't want the small corp to become dependent on them. Simple contract termination becomes costly and litigious otherwise. Let the big fish swim together.

Add counterparty risk to that too: if things go south and Big Corp decides to sue, small corp may go bankrupt in the process.

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

#367

Post by goodells »

nradov wrote: post #280
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…

A two tiered system might actually be better for improving access to affordable health. Mid-level providers seem to achieve equivalent outcomes for routine cases at lower cost. I agree that Congress should increase funding for residency programs. https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/ama-seeks-mor...

I generally dismiss these “equivalent outcome” studies. Any midlevel will (and should) bounce the more complicated cases to their supervising physicians. Outcomes at that point are meaningless.

There’s definitely a trade off between resources devoted to education vs. acceptable risks from failed procedures, missed/delayed diagnoses, and increased utilization of imaging and referrals (and the physician radiologists and others who participate in that - it goes full circle). Physicians now are probably on one extreme end of that, and midlevels on the other.

On the topic of servicing rural areas… the problem is that nobody with better options (which includes midlevels) wants to live in these places. These educated, high-earning people want to live in urban areas, and they can. CMS has tried to incentivize this with billing by offering higher reimbursement rates to rural places that have a midlevel on staff. That’s about it, though.

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

#368

Post by kortilla »

cycomanic wrote: post #252
tomrod wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, due to massively inflated prices.

It's funny how on these forums people who actually do something good and useful like GPs are considered overpriced, but at the same time many here work for FANGs or other webad businesses often making more than GPs. I know that if it comes to decide between the health industry and Facebook, Google, Apple or MS I sure know which I'd rather keep.

FAANG doesn’t cost 15% of the GDP though. Not sure why you’re comparing those.

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

#369

Post by perardi »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #338
perardi wrote: post #103

I worked for one of the companies that IBM acquired to make this non-product. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-merge-healthcare-m-a-ibm/... I have no idea what they got for the money they spent. Merge Healthcare was the most miserable work experience I have ever had. They had patents, I guess, but the actual technology was garbage. And the owner was…a piece of work, let's say that. https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/67…

> Merge Healthcare was the most miserable work experience I have ever had. Was it the orange ties?

Ha, in a way.

Because they were indicative of Ferro’s “leadership”: flashy branding gimmicks, with nothing to back them up.

Like when he bought an orange Tesla roadster to bring to trade shows. He’d just pop an orange car in the middle of the booth. What’s that got to do with health care? I dunno.

(And this was all a while ago, but this job just always stuck in my craw, because it made “Silicon Valley” feel like an understated documentary and not a parody.)

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

#370

Post by lvl100 »

tekstar wrote: post #260

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was s…

This reminded me of my experience with them a few years back with MQTT. They were pushing their Bluemix/cloud hard and I just wanted to test it out. Never again.
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