I am pleased to share the news that Perficient Health Sciences recently entered into an agreement with IBM Watson Health, to become a SaaS partner for Watson for Oncology in the United States.
According to the National Cancer Institute[1], in 2018, an estimated 1,735,350 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States, and 609,640 people will die from the disease.
With cancer prevalence rates on the increase, it is critically important to have efficient means to analyze relevant medical literature and real world evidence in cancer treatment to support physicians and other cancer experts as they work to determine the best care pathways for their patients.
IBM and Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) have spent the last 6 years training the IBM Watson cognitive computing system, to build Watson for Oncology[2], a Software as a Services platform designed to accelerate personalized care for patients with cancer.
Oncologists at MSK have been training Watson with relevant data associated with a patient’s cancer, such as blood test results, pathology and imaging reports, cancer type, tumor size and location, and any presence of genetic mutations.
IBM and MSK have also added a massive corpus of medical literature to the Watson for Oncology platform. Watson is able to read through millions of pages of medical text in seconds, understand and interpret the documents, use sophisticated algorithms to analyze the medical literature against the patient’s data, MSK’s curated data, and Real World Evidence, in order to make patient specific treatment recommendations for consideration by the patient’s cancer care team.
Studies show that Watson for Oncology is now achieving 90% concordance with tumor board recommendations.
Watson for Oncology is ideally suited to health systems seeking to enhance their cancer treatment programs through clinical practice guidelines and the efficient identification of the best treatment pathways, based upon real world evidence.
As a SaaS partner Perficient is a reseller of the Watson for Oncology service, and provides consulting services to plan, implement and support the adoption of the solution. This includes data integration services to move data from a client’s EHR and other clinical systems into the Watson cloud for processing.
Cancer is a complex disease; let us tackle it together automating the analysis of millions of data points that will support Physicians and Cancer Care teams in their mission to provide the best possible care for cancer patients.
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics
[2] https://www.ibm.com/watson/health/oncology-and-genomics/oncology/
