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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

#561

Post by naijaboiler »

RHSeeger wrote: post #330
jac241 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

the real problem with NP/PA is now what they know. It is that they don't even know what they don't know. There's a large body of basic science, biology, that a doctor has to acquire that helps underpins a lot of the clinical medicine they practise. It's not just following guidelines and algorithms. It is understanding why the guidelines are, it is understanding why what looks like a typical case isn't, but is that one rare thing you absolutely can't miss.

Honestly, if not for the weirdness of the US system, mid-level providers shouldn't exist. But we are where we are. There absolutely is no room for independent practise for mid-level providers.

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

#562

Post by naijaboiler »

RHSeeger wrote: post #335
nradov wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that patients of NPs actually have worse outcomes? Given the current physician shortage would it be better to wait to see one, or get an appointment with a NP right away?

My expectation is that the outcomes would be similar for the common issues, and would start to deviate as you got into more uncommon problems. A doctor will have a lot more "background knowledge" to be able to consider things that are outside the every day. At least in my mind, it's not unlike someone in software development with a degree in it vs not. For most things, the person without a degree will do a fine job;…

correct. except the person doesn't even know when they don't know. and that's the most dangerous part. If you at least know what you don't know, you can re-direct to the right resources.

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

#563

Post by aceon48 »

formeribmer wrote: post #479

I worked at IBM Watson as one of the early engineers when they first started commercializing the product. It was a fucking joke - Ginni Rometty would go up on stage and said that Watson can help diagnose cancer from CT scans and we would just look at each other and be like "Dude, Watson is just a glorified Lucene index, wtf is she talking about." They started selling Watson as the end-all for everything from cancer d…

How was she not fired long long ago? And then she got a huge exit pay package...

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

#564

Post by indymike »

cube00 wrote: post #30
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…

> 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.

This is true in the US, too. GPs have become "procedure mills". It's almost as if management figured out they just have to put the right code on the bill enough times a day. Since no one is accountable for outcomes, money happens.

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

#565

Post by digisign »

mrtksn wrote: post #550
akudha wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

640$, lol My entire wardrobe costs less than that, and no, I am not lying. It must be nice to have enough money to spend on such luxury. Is it really that much better than a $10 t-shirt?

Oh, it is much better than a $10 shirt but its utility doesn't come from it's comfort or purely aesthetics IMHO. Maybe it's silly but people do judge from appearance because it tells something about you. I have been watching this famous fashion photographer and he was talking about using an iPhone for last photoshoot and he noted that he can do it and charge full price for it only because he already has a name in the…

"Three wolves howling at the moon," might do it. :-D

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

#566

Post by doctor_eval »

Traster wrote: post #533
jelling wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh...I get why tech people are suspect of Palantir but they're just disrupting other government contractors. And from my limited experience working with the government, they absolutely need / want / rely on having companies hold their hand as they insist on doing things the hard, slow, and very custom way.

To be honest, my experience of private enterprise is that they insist on doing things hard, slow and very custom. Almost every problem that exists is distinct enough that you can argue it doesn't fit the existing COTS software. It's sometimes necesary to build something yourself, but no where near as often as it is done.

If I remember correctly, John Ralston Saul made the point [0] that there is little observed difference in terms of the efficiency of decision making between large government and large corporations.

My personal experience is that large organisations and government are barely distinguishable. This is often excused in the name of "risk mitigation" - but in my experience it's really just that there are more snouts in the money trough, and that politics is more important than success. The close ties between government and the largest organisations also invite a similar culture.

The end result for both government and large enterprise is "hard, slow and very custom". (Of course, there are exceptions in both government and enterprise).

[0] http://www.johnralstonsaul.com/non-fiction-books/the-unconsc...

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

#567

Post by uejfiweun »

ravi-delia wrote: post #484
tyre wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few reasons for this: + People care about what other people are talking about. They like to fit in, like they're part of the cutting-edge. + Less experienced people have less…experience with the downsides of what they're reading about. + CS is no longer mostly people who care about computer science, in the same way that economics isn't only for people who want the understand economics. Tech salaries — especially en…

> CS is no longer mostly people who care about computer science, in the same way that economics isn't only for people who want the understand economics. That's the main reason I decided against a CS major even though I love the subject. It's just disheartening listening to discount business majors butcher even simple technical topics. The pure math track actually has more than a few people in the same situation, so I…

These people may be majoring in CS, but there's really no way around it in the end - to be successful in this field, you have to really love computers. Unless you're a certifiable genius, part of the challenge of this field is just spending a ton of time in front of the computer, learning all the little things. This is a lifelong journey, one that's impossible to complete, and one you can't fake or BS your way through. I don't think CS is a bad major, it's still extremely marketable, but you just have to recognize that this is just one piece of the puzzle for the top jobs, and the other piece is technical prowess, a skill you really have to grind to get good at.

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

#568

Post by listenallyall »

nextaccountic wrote: post #545
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…

> How else are doctors, especially those who are 10, 20 years removed from their residency, supposed to learn about new treatments and medicines? With some other mechanism that doesn't have major conflicts of interest? Like, I don't know, attending to actual courses, like any other profession that requires continuing training.

Who is teaching the courses? Where do they get their info? Given the very limited oversight of "continuing education", it's trivial for Merck or Pfizer to ensure their advocate teaches the class or records the online seminar -- with zero requirement that they disclose that fact. At least when a drug rep visits the office and buys lunch, you know the source.

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

#569

Post by vijucat »

Man, I was so excited by that Jeopardy win. I fired up my Eclipse Prolog and went through a few example from "A Gentle Guide to Constraint Logic Programming via ECLiPSe", http://www.anclp.pl/, and Bratko. It would have been such a win for Prolog if IBM Watson did well. See https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-process... for more context

(Of course, that's just a sub-system I'm focusing on; there's a lot more to Watson than parsing).

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

#570

Post by matheusmoreira »

wildzzz wrote: post #493
aenis wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

It's because they want to talk to the most power in the decision but with the least information as to how the problem could be solved without the help of Oracle/IBM/whoever.

One would think the decision makers would trust the technical advice of the smart people they've hired instead of the opinion of some obviously lying salesman...
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