Cleveland Clinic and IBM are collaborating to advance the use of Watson in medical training. The IBM team of researchers that created Watson will work with Cleveland Clinic clinicians, faculty and medical students to enhance the capabilities of Watson’s Deep Question Answering technology for the area of medicine.

An increasing number of factors, including regulatory barriers and less return on investment, are thwarting efforts to bring new medical device technologies to the U.S. market. However, as medical innovation becomes less hardware oriented, new avenues present themselves.

BOSTON—Remote patient monitoring has been around for a long time but tends to be in the early stages for most organizations, said Khinlei Myint-U, MBA, corporate manager of product development and communications for the Center for Connected Health in Boston. Myint-U was part of a panel discussion at the ninth annual Connected Health Symposium on Oct. 25.

Western medicine has become so closely associated with high-tech medical equipment that it’s top of mind even for patients.

Does any of this sound familiar to the CMIOs? A physician colleague stops you in the hall to tell you about a cool new application that he or she saw at a conference. “It downloads information from our system and creates a readmission risk score. All we need to do is create the data feed from our system. The vendor said it was easy.”

Consumers have increasingly used social media networks to share news and maintain personal relationships, but healthcare has been slow to establish its presence in this virtual landscape. As more patients turn to the internet for healthcare needs, healthcare professionals are presented with a powerful tool to help bridge a gap in patient-provider communications.

Providers across the U.S. are facing the same set of problems. Imaging data volumes are increasing and more storage is needed. Simultaneously, more departments outside of radiology are looking to store images, and some IT departments simply don’t have the storage capacity. Many are finding an answer in the cloud, and with the explosive growth of cloud-based image management systems, it seems only a matter of time before they become
the standard in healthcare.

Early RFID adopter Tallahassee Memorial finds the ROI soft but substantial.