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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

#391
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big deals can really put a company in danger. If the company you work with closes or cuts the deal or whatever you could loose half your revenue. On top of that big clients can be really needy especially dinosaurs companies that aren’t nimble. They take forever to pay, have lots of meetings and unreasonable expectations and expect lots of free stuff and service because they are incapable of processing Non standard in…

While that's true, the execs who make these decisions usually don't care about the actual implementation. Once the deal is done, it falls on their "IT division". And two things happen: Jim over at IBM still pampers the exec with a dinner or two. And the exec also suspects that some, if not most, of the problems are with his IT team.

Big companies have very strong anti kickback rules. You can get around them through board level connections but not much sort of That. Nobody Is risking 500k a year compensation over a dinner or 2.

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

#392
post #249

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…

It's their responsibility to stay up-to-date. If a dev can keep up with front end tech stacks, doctors, who are much more elite in their education, should keep track of latest treatment breakthroughs in their domain of expertise.

Continuing medical education not only a responsibility but also a requirement to maintain a medical license in many states (e.g. California [1]).

[1]: https://www.mbc.ca.gov/Licensing/Physicians-and-Surgeons/Ren...

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be nice if you edited your post with the correction.

There's still a phenomenon in advertising where it increases your awareness of a category, but you don't correctly ascribe it to the correct advertiser in that category. So funnily enough, I could still see someone going to IBM based on this ad.

Or when Microsoft spent millions on giving NFL reporters tablets while in air, only for the reporters to refer to the tablets as „iPads“? :D

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

#394
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Beat your doctor on what? You can already get 10 full blood panel tests per year if you want. You can just pay for it and don't need insurance. But what will you do with the data? For most people the results won't tell you anything useful.

https://www.ondemand.labcorp.com/lab-tests/comprehensive-hea...

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

#395
post #111

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…

Healthcare IT is all garbage. It’s as if the people who invested in the space specifically did not want any of the inefficiencies to go away.

The inefficiencies are where all the money is made. After all, patients don’t pay and they certainly don’t pay for results.

Patients may pay for insurance, and buy the right to not worry. Insurance delivers peace of mind by with appointments, papers, and pills. Look at all the bureaucracy and money, it must be fancy and effective. In the course of producing these papers are human doctors, nurses, coders, etc. They sometimes feel a sense of human decency and help people pro bono.

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

#396

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…

> an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME.

What the fuck is this? A name/email for your company when trying something out is so that you can keep track of any support requests we need, not for you to sell shit to me.

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

#397

I'm excited by this. I recently left Red Hat for greener pastures. From where I sat, IBM was slowly turning toward wisdom again, having been run aground by its previous few CEOs. I was skeptical when IBM bought Red Hat, but after several years of not screwing it up, I'm pretty hopeful. Now, Krishna is working on streamlining the business and making the rest of IBM more like Red Hat. Splitting off the low performing K…

Curious, what does RedHat actually do ?

They make sure enterprises can run Linux that doesn’t “suddenly” (read: with less than 2-3 years notice) break their critical workflows because some component loses support or some dependency reaches EOL - they do this by extended maintenance, backporting (security) patches to old versions, providing tailored support etc.

This is very valuable to enterprises and so they pay a lot for it.

For example, you can still run Red Hat 6 safely and securely until 2024; by that point Red Hat 8 will have been out for 5 years already.

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

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also helps to have a relationship with a patient (or person). There are some people who will never, ever complain about anything. When they complain of severe abdominal pain, for example, you pull out all the stops immediately to figure out what's wrong, because it's probably really bad. On the other hand, there are hypochondriacs and people will low pain tolerance. While they can certainly also become seriously i…

Sometimes a relationship is bad. If you think someone’s a hypochondriac, but in fact they’re unusually sensitive, you’ll dismiss a lot of what they say and that can be quite damaging over time. (Especially if they’re female https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/women-and-pain-dispariti... ). I wouldn’t eliminate GPs from the process, but many people actually would like to hear what the robots have to say about their me…

There is no evidence that diagnostic robots would actually produce better outcomes. The hypochondriacs are already able to Google their symptoms and make themselves sick with anxiety.

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

#400
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even AWS contracts are vague enough to not make this a slam dunk. They pretty much explicitly say if you don’t store stuff in multiple regions you are going to take outages/data loss.
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