Methodist Health System joins with IBM Watson and MD Buyline to enable better patient care

Methodist Health System, a premier healthcare provider in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, will leverage MD Buyline's Hippocrates powered by IBM Watson (a cognitive computing application) in its hospitals to enable better patient care, satisfaction and outcomes through more informed decision making. Methodist and MD Buyline will collaborate to identify important structured and unstructured Big Data from both organizations to train Watson to extract, learn, understand and assign context to return real-time, evidence-based responses for users within Methodist Health System.

"This is a tremendous opportunity for Methodist to use comparative effectiveness data to improve care for our patients," said Sam Bagchi, MD, Senior Vice President, Chief Medical Informatics, Chief Quality Office, Methodist Health System. "The addition of Hippocrates powered by IBM Watson is a unique opportunity to align our core values of innovation and quality."

As an advocate for advancing and improving the quality of care, MD Buyline believes Hippocrates powered by IBM Watson is the next generation solution that utilizes Big Data to transform how hospitals make important decisions every day. The quality, objective and evidence-based clinical and financial data MD Buyline has gathered and analyzed for over 30 years combined with the industry's most current clinical evidence will be made available in real time through the revolutionary cognitive computing application. Most importantly, Hippocrates will improve care quality by encouraging patient-focused, unbiased healthcare decisions.

"Hippocrates powered by IBM Watson presents healthcare providers with an unparalleled opportunity to impact and improve patient outcomes by deriving conclusions across structured and unstructured data, such as health system and facility's data systems, MD Buyline clinical and financial data, and publicly available data," said Satin Mirchandani, CEO of MD Buyline.

With our hospital partners, such as Methodist, Watson will learn information specific to that health system and its patients and research. While Watson is learning this information, it's also assigning context and weighing the data according to the reliability of the source. With this approach, Hippocrates provides our hospital partners with real-time access to the latest clinical and financial research, MD Buyline data and first-hand experiences within their own hospitals.

Hippocrates is designed to be easy to use and collaborate so several areas of the hospital (e.g., clinical and financial support, quality improvement, supply chain, physicians, and the C-suite) can utilize and benefit from the cognitive computing platform.

Within Hippocrates, users are able to initiate projects, create goals and assign collaborators. Users will ask Hippocrates a question using natural language and human speech. Hippocrates calls upon Watson to use hypotheses and evidence-based learning to generate a list of confidence-weighted answers. To present the best scenarios and analysis, Watson analyzes thousands of documents and data points from health systems, MD Buyline and the industry that healthcare providers would not otherwise have access to. Hippocrates reduces the time required to generate analysis of this quality from months to minutes.

Collaborators can view and comment on the results Hippocrates generated in a social setting. This allows physicians and clinicians to share first-hand experiences with other areas of the hospital. And users can continue to ask questions of Hippocrates to further educate themselves to make the best overall decisions for their patients, physicians and facilities.

"With Hippocrates powered by IBM Watson, healthcare providers are now able to efficiently make the right decisions for their patients and hospitals based on quality, evidence-based information in real time. This Big Data solution is unparalleled in how it enlightens and empowers users to support healthier decisions, hospitals and, ultimately, patients," said Mirchandani.

Source: Methodist Health System