Swedish oncology Health IT vendor Elekta has announced that it will be collaborating with IBM Watson Health, industry leader in artificial intelligence, to provide Watson for Oncology as a branch of Elekta’s cancer treatment systems. Elekta said that it will be marketing Watson for Oncology under the heading of an AI-based clinical decision support system that can easily be paired within Elekta’s digital cancer care systems. This also includes the MOSAIQ Oncology Information System.
Elekta CEO Richard Hausmann said that the goal of their company was to apply AI to the cancer care continuum. He said that AI should be there to help in every step along the way from treatment planning and all the way to evidence-based treatment recommendations.
According to EMRFinder, the oncology information systems industry is extremely specialized and does not offer a lot of players. The big companies that are dominant in the space are Elekta and Varian, and other prominent EHR vendors include Epic, RaySearch and Accuray.
IBM joined hands with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to develop Watson for Oncology in New York. This can easily summarize key healthcare attributes of a patient and offer information to oncologists in order to assist them in delivering treatment options that are based on training from Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologists.
Watson for Oncology positions the treatment possibilities, linking to peer-reviewed researches that have been developed by Memorial Sloan Kettering. Watson for Oncology further delivers a large quantity of medical literature for the providers, physicians and clinicians to consider. The system draws on more than 300 medical journals, nearly 15 million pages of text and more than 200 textbooks to offer insights to the physicians regarding different treatment options.
According to prominent studies Cancer accounts for one in six deaths world-wide. Per World Health Organization, each year more than 14 million new cancer cases are reported worldwide. As healthcare providers strive to enable data-driven and evidence-based cancer healthcare, and great explosion of medical information was created and if offered both opportunities and challenges to assist in the improvement quality of care.
