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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

#431

Post by robbiep »

nradov wrote: post #385
derefr wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 hos…

That's simply false. You obviously have no idea how hospital care is actually delivered. To start with, every admitted patient has an assigned attending physician who is responsible for coordinating the care team. Some things can be documented in the patient chart but there are always gaps. Clinical decision support systems for partially automating diagnosis could potentially be helpful in some limited circumstances…

I’ll second how misguided that view of hospital care is. There is ALWAYS a treating team, always an admitting consultant/attending

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

#432

Post by geofft »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #406
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…

> 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. That’s exactly right, but there’s nothing wrong with that. A good doctor’s memory of patients spanning decades of a career and all of the various treatments that they did or did not respond to is very valuable. It’s a good thing that they offload as muc…

I think the comment above, most charitably read, is that a lot more people would have access to high-quality healthcare if you could put this work on robots instead of people, because computers excel at storing data and looking it up accurately and following predetermined rules. There would be fewer cases of people going to their doctor and being told "oh, it's nothing" when it actually is a specific, rare, and urgent problem. And then they would end up going to a human specialist to figure out how to fix that problem.

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

#433

Post by cosmodisk »

Brybry wrote: post #38
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…

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.

I used to see this in our country, where 10 people are queueing outside doc's office ( this is public health system) when some well dressed man goes straight into the office not even bothering to ask if there's anyone in there and fast forward a few min and the doctor is 'on break', whilst drinking coffee with the sales rep, while all those people sit and wait. Eventually it got outlawed.

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

#434

Post by Forge36 »

captainmuon wrote: post #257

I think "Watson" was never a thing (a technology or a product). Rather it was a marketing term. "Watson" meant any solution or research project that was developed by IBM and had remotely to do with AI. A bit like "Active*" or "NET" back in the day for Microsoft.

Capitalize on the "machine learning" hype with a unique name sold as a developed product?

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

#435

Post by aenis »

mrtksn wrote: post #408
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…

The company I worked for used some Oracle tech and I was trying to get some high level information about a product but their website kept requesting my e-mail just to show me some documentation. Once I provided them with my e-mail, I started receiving "You must take us to your leader" messages in a tone as if I was their employee and they were commanding me to take them to my CEO. I can't imagine myself chasing the C…

Funny, similar thing happened to me.

IBM along a few other behemots pitched for a serious project at a company I worked for as enterprise arch. All companies brought their top salespeople, and all tried nasty things, but IBM was by far the worst. Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays. He mentioned - and I am not making this up - that he should be talking to people higher in the org. (The most junior person in the room was me, the rest were board-2/-3s). It soon emerged their thing could not work, and I killed it in the first round of pitching. What followed was my bosses' boss, the CIO of a very large company, called me and gave me an earfull since he himself has to explain to CEO why we had the audacity to not choose IBM.

I'd not touch anything IBM ever. Bunch of assholes.

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

#436

Post by morpheuskafka »

As someone doing a CS degree now, I seem to be the only one who doesn't want to have anything on my resume to do with "AI", blockchain, ML, NFT, chatbots, etc... all I see is overhyped product after product, one-size-fits all solutions that frustrate customers and create problems for humans to clean up, hugely valued companies that have very little real improvement over conventional technology, etc.

An "AI chatbot" is far inferior to a real user interface. A real user interface allows discoverability (looking through menus to notice functions that may be useful later), experimentation, and puts the user in control of the program.

For example, my bank apparently only supports viewing the reason for card declines through the chatbot--something I never knew, because I took the time to go through the menus when I first got the app and learn what functions existed.

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

#437

Post by mrtksn »

blastonico wrote: post #426
mrtksn wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I worked for used some Oracle tech and I was trying to get some high level information about a product but their website kept requesting my e-mail just to show me some documentation. Once I provided them with my e-mail, I started receiving "You must take us to your leader" messages in a tone as if I was their employee and they were commanding me to take them to my CEO. I can't imagine myself chasing the C…

> You must take us to your leader. LOL, it sounds like General Zod in Superman II (1981). You should have asked if they want you to kneel before them as well.

It was both funny and scary as if I was reached by demanding aliens who were watching me :)

I didn't know what to do, so I simply start marking it as spam and moved on. I guess they had a sales pitch based on the stuff I looked at.

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

#438

Post by avrionov »

Many people shame the startups for fake it until you make it, but IBM with Watson and Watson Health did exactly that for years and 'serious' analysts were predicting how their healthcare AI efforts will increase their revenue.

Compare their results with Tesla.

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

#440

Post by [deleted] »

qaq wrote: post #388
stathibus wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something. This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology. I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world…

Kindah like Palantir

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