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Michael S. Weiner, DO, chief medical information officer at IBM Healthcare knows a thing or two about key health care initiatives and how they fit into today’s complex world. In his role at IBM, he is tasked with identifying new business areas and opportunities that will continuously increase the delivery of quality health care solutions.

His session on the Future of Health Care With Cognitive Computing offered attendees a look back at outdated modules and a view into the future of new health care strategies.





Weiner believes the future of health care is closely aligned with three major trends: an aging population, more technology and new care models. “Every day for the next 20 years, 10,000 Baby Boomers will reach age 65. And by the year 2030, the number of people with chronic conditions will have increased by 37 percent since 2000,” Weiner said.

But today’s health care industry is dealing with data overload and plugging new technologies into old business models has caused health care costs to rise rather than fall. “Today, everything needs to be in the cloud. No one is putting a server on their premises anymore to support all of this data. This way the physicians can be easily engaged and the patients can be engaged. The end result is that we can spot, treat and prevent disease early,” he said.

IBM’s Michael Weiner offered attendees a look back at outdated modules and a view into the future of new health care strategies.
To prepare for Watson’s appearance on Jeopardy, IBM fed it 30 years of the game show’s questions and answers and trained it to answer correctly.
Weiner feels a new ecosystem of disruptive business models for health care must arise: mobile care services, wireless health devices, home monitoring, telehealth e-visits and even hospitals at home. “Ultimately, technology is being sought out to help deliver better quality care at a better cost for the population,” he said.

Other new care models are also starting to emerge. “Now that we are starting to move care out of the hospital and clinic and into the home we are going to start to have sensors in the home. I recently worked on a project where we measured people walking through the house. Once they got a hip replacement, we wanted to make sure their life flow was the same and they can continue to walk through the house. We were able to monitor that through the sensors.”

A prime example of the convergence of health care, technology and new care models is IBM’s high profile cognitive system, known as Watson. To prepare for Watson’s appearance on Jeopardy, IBM fed it 30 years of the game show’s questions and answers and trained it to answer correctly. “After Watson’s win on Jeopardy in 2011, the health care organizations started calling, so we sent Watson to medical school and a year ago we launched IBM Watson Health,” Weiner said.

Today, Watson is ushering in a new era of computing as it helps to treat cancer, read EHRs and medical images, in the fight to treat diseases early and up the preventive medicine game.

mkane@jobson.com