Better healthcare starts with accurate diagnoses for ailments. Unfortunately, it’s not always feasible. In the United States, the lack of interoperability among medical systems and the need for fact-based advice prevent healthcare professionals from giving fast, accurate analyses.
Furthermore, medical facilities are prone to having outdated records-keeping practices, making gathering information tedious for everyone involved. Two companies that are trying to fix these issues are Microsoft and IBM. Here is a closer look at the two platforms and how they can help medical professionals do their jobs more efficiently.
IBM’s Watson platform: a pioneer in healthcare medical systems
Named after IBM’s founder, Watson is a supercomputer that leverages artificial intelligence, combining it with high-powered analytical software. Watson started as a “question answering” machine, and its first commercial implementation was in 2013 at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
The center used Watson to recommend treatment options for lung cancer cases, prioritizing ones that reduce costs without compromising quality. Since then, several other providers have also implemented Watson tools like the Westmed Medical Group, the Maine Center for Cancer medicine, and the Cleveland Clinic.
Another exciting development for the healthcare industry is IBM publishing APIs on its cloud that let independent users build apps that use Watson’s core technology.
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: enables collaboration
Like IBM, Microsoft provides healthcare-specific workflows and APIs for improving health outcomes. One thing it does differently is it integrates data repositories without compromising patient information. Data privacy is a big concern for many patients, and Microsoft’s Cloud for Healthcare attempts to fix data interoperability.
The company now embraces Open Source and Linux and is on the frontlines in defending interoperability. Cloud for Healthcare is accessible to patients and administrators. The best thing about it, though, is it allows seamless movement between stores of data, letting doctors, AIs, or patients get to the information they need to decide on a case.
Aside from these, Microsoft has partnered with more than 55 companies to create an integrated solution for medical facilities, including companies like Accenture, Avanade, Innovaccer, and others. Microsoft’s ecosystem helps medical professionals build and extend their capabilities using the company’s System Integrator or SI partners.
Microsoft and IBM: a valuable partnership
Microsoft and IBM are leading the charge in creating valuable innovations for the healthcare industry. Using IBM’s capabilities in cognitive computing and Microsoft-driven medical solutions can help medical professionals in several kinds of research; notably, in COVID-19.
Supercomputers can help fight the virus because these high-performance systems let researchers make significant amounts of calculations at once, which has applications in epidemiology, molecular modeling, and more. Watson and Cloud for Healthcare speed up the timeline for experiments that would take years to work out by hand or slower analytical platforms.
Conclusion
A patient’s recovery often hinges on doctors and medical professionals coming up with sound treatment plans. However, certain diseases could be difficult to diagnose; in some cases, the promptness of the treatment’s delivery is a matter of life and death. With solutions like Cloud for Healthcare and Watson, doctors can find solutions and collaborate on challenging cases more efficiently.
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