Empowering individuals to take charge of their health

The rising cost of care—and the increasing proportion of those costs being covered directly by consumers—makes it more important that individuals obtain the information needed to take make informed lifestyle choices. “We need to empower consumers to be members of their own care team,” said Judy Murphy, Chief Nursing Officer at IBM. “That takes giving people a baseline so they know what ‘good’ is, and making core health indicators more accessible.”

This idea of the consumer as a member of the care team is not new, but many providers are struggling with how. Cognitive technology can help. “People will be better patients if they know what’s going to be done to and for them,” Murphy said. “Health outcomes themselves are easy to measure. What’s harder to manage are behaviors, like whether an individual is adhering to a particular treatment protocol.” Such adherence can be affected by a number of factors. A drug may be expensive, so a patient may decide to skip or moderate a dose. Sometimes, too, the onset of disease slips past people because they experience only a gradual decline.

Cognitive tools can help medical teams address these issues. A European healthcare company created an online chat function that patients can use for specific recommendations on activities that will improve their overall health. The tool is part of the company’s wider effort to evolve from healthcare provider to lifelong health partner. Behind its user interface, a cognitive analytics engine sifts through multiple streams of data, including the individual’s primary care doctor’s decisions, detailed clinical histories and unstructured data such as articles, guidelines, physician notes and social media. Specialized pattern recognition capabilities allow the system to identify risk factors and develop tailored health plans for individual patients.

Wearing your health on your sleeve (or your wrist)

In this era of wearables and fitness trackers, some companies find cognitive technology to be the next step in delivering meaningful data-backed health and fitness insights. “When it comes to digital health and fitness tracking, we’re now at a point where a shift is occurring and consumers are demanding more from this information,” said Kevin Plank, Founder and CEO of Under Armour.

To respond to that demand, Under Armour introduced an app that supports a cognitive coaching system. The UA Record app serves as a personal health consultant, fitness trainer and assistant by providing athletes with evidence-based coaching on sleep, fitness, activity and nutrition. Because the cognitive system can analyze a variety of data, it can deliver insights that affect health and fitness programs, including physiological and behavioral data, nutrition information, expert training knowledge and weather forecasts.

Cognitive technology is also opening new opportunities for discreet monitoring and care of the elderly and those shut in due to illness or disability. Nokia is exploring opportunities to integrate cognitive functionality into wearables and smart devices for home care. Voice-activated interfaces in the home can take simple commands, like “call an ambulance,” and offer reminders to take medicines or turn off appliances. “Wearables, smart devices and conversational interfaces are game changers in health care,” said Cedric Hutchings, VP of Digital Health at Nokia. “They help create a broad ecosystem of ‘collaborators’ including family, caregivers, hospitals, employers, insurers and emergency service providers who work together to ensure vulnerable individuals stay in their homes as long as possible.”

Improving healthcare access and outcomes

Cognitive systems help spread best practices and clinical expertise to under-served communities and propagate the most effective treatments and therapies for a range of conditions. India, for example, faces an acute shortage of oncologists. Many doctors, servicing massive populations spread among far-flung rural villages, face an uphill battle to stay abreast of best practices in treatment and care management. To address these challenges, India’s Manipal Hospital has adopted a cognitive computing platform that analyzes data to identify evidence-based treatment options. The system will help oncologists treat the more than 200,000 individuals who receive cancer care at Manipal facilities each year, and provide cancer patients with individualized healthcare plans. The platform is designed to support remote guidance as well. Navinder Sachar, an IBM Watson leader in India, explains that patients who live too far to access one of Manipal’s facilities can work with their local clinic and engage in a virtual consultation. “Providing expanded access to care is one of the cornerstones of Manipal’s philanthropic mission,” Sachar said. “Cognitive dashboards allow rural cancer patients to receive personalized, high-quality care. In a country like India with massive rural populations, this type of diagnostic support has the potential to be transformative.”

In India and elsewhere, cognitive tools can speed up discovery and identify the best treatments for different needs. In the US, initiatives like the Watson Genomics Advisor can radically accelerate clinical trials, a process that now takes an average of ten years, and better match individuals to specific therapies. “This collaboration is about giving clinicians the ability to do for a broader population what is currently only available to a small number—identify personalized, precision cancer treatments,” said Steve Harvey, Vice President, IBM Watson Health. That capability not only expands access, but also ensures the best thinking from the most advanced research is shared. That’s especially important when treating disease types that can spread aggressively.

“When you are dealing with cancer, it is always a race,” said Dr. Lukas Wartman, Assistant Director of Cancer Genomics at The McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. “As a cancer patient myself, I know how important genomic information can be. Translating cancer-sequencing results into treatment options often takes weeks to study just one patient’s tumor and guide treatment decisions. Cognitive technology appears to help dramatically reduce that timeline.”

The path to cognitive healthcare

The use of cognitive technology in healthcare is still in its infancy. The next decade will likely see a surge in innovation from established organizations and entrepreneurs alike. Given the complexities, however, initiatives need to be managed carefully. For healthcare organizations interested in exploring cognitive capabilities, it’s important to first develop a cognitive strategy.

Cognitive capabilities can transform healthcare, but only if the vision is fully articulated. Specific goals must be established within the competitive context of markets. Critical data sources must be identified, along with services and processes that can fully benefit from cognitive. Healthcare organizations will also need to ensure secure, scalable and open technology foundations. To build cognition into the devices and systems that matter, the underlying IT core must be open and stable. Public, private and hybrid cloud resources underpin this work, along with trusted security throughout the network.