IBM announced several major Watson Health developments this week during its World of Watson symposium in New York City. Chief among those developments are partnerships with Epic, the Mayo Clinic and a total of 14 leading cancer institutes. By teaming up with these industry heavyweights, IBM is further investing in Watson as a vehicle for advanced personalized medicine.
These institutions will be among the first to use Watson to quickly use DNA insights to develop personalized treatments, IBM says. Through the collaboration with Epic, Watson will be integrated into the EHR in order to quickly match eligible patients with relevant clinical trials.
IBM notes that Epic has more than 350 customers, including some of the most-recognized healthcare systems in the world, and that it exchanged more than 80 million patient records during the past year, both inside and outside the Epic community. By working together, Watson and Epic will be able to help personalize treatments for patients and support providers with critical evidence and case studies most relevant to each patient's care.
IBM's Sean Hogan, General Manager and VP for Healthcare, spoke to Healthcare Dive about the upcoming integration of Watson and Epic.
Is there any target timeline for the integration with Epic?
"The Watson capabilities will be integrated into Epic 2015 edition certified EHR technology; earlier versions of Epic will get it too," Hogan wrote in an email to Healthcare Dive. He says the integration effort will unfold in steps, with the initial integration set to support the Clinical Trial Matching use case. Over time, additional use cases that leverage other Watson cognitive capabilities will be supported, Hogan says.
What should healthcare IT professionals know about how to access and leverage Watson via Epic?
Providers who use Epic will be able to set up partnerships to use the Watson software, Hogan says. Here's how it will work for clinical trials matching with Mayo:
- Initially, Mayo Clinic will receive patient records for individuals who are transferred from referring hospitals running Epic, and then process them for clinical trial matching using Watson's cognitive computing ability. "Epic is seamlessly and securely extracting patient data from health records, delivering it to Watson to be quickly compared with massive volumes of relevant clinical data, to find appropriate matches," Hogan said.
- Over time the Mayo Clinic will roll out its own implementation of Epic, and will then be able to feed its patient data to Watson directly.
- IBM and Epic intend the integration to work in both directions, Hogan notes. "Not only will patient records be sent from Epic to Watson, Watson-generated insights also will be integrated back into the Epic system workflow," he says.
- Epic and IBM plan to use open, interoperable APIs. "This will include use of FHIR, the 'Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources' emerging standard being developed by the HL7 standards organization, which is supported by a wide range of providers and healthcare IT vendors," Hogan said.
Are there any plans at this time to integrate Watson with any other EHRs, or to keep it exclusive?
IBM is continuing to grow the Watson ecosystem, Hogan says, noting the recent announcements at HIMSS about partnerships with J&J, Medtronic and Apple. Additional EHRs could become part of that plan. "We are open to working with other partners, including other EHR providers, to expand the Watson Health ecosystem," he said.