It's been a busy few weeks for IBM Watson. The company's cognitive computing model has announced partnerships with CVS Health, Apple, Medtronic and Johnson & Johnson, and most recently the acquisition of imaging software company Merge Healthcare. Watson has big plans, and it's going to need a lot of data to pull them off.
"Images are the next frontier in healthcare data analytics," Paddy Padmanabhan, CEO for Damo Consulting, wrote in a post for CIO. The Merge Healthcare acquisition combined with Watson's cognitive sciences and machine learning capability should, in theory, position the company to improve its predictive ability based on large amounts of patient medical information, Mr. Padmanabhan wrote.
However, what Watson still needs before it can put its tools and acquisitions to work is access to patient data.
"While the Explorys acquisition gave IBM some access to patient medical records through the Cleveland Clinic connection, it's a drop in the bucket relative to the amount of data sitting inside [big systems like Epic and Cerner]," Mr. Padmanabhan wrote. "It's pretty clear that IBM would love to get its hand on a large chunk of patient data."
Cerner seems an unlikely candidate due to its recent win of the history-making DOD EHR contract and Epic has provided no indication that it intends to go public anytime soon, according to Mr. Padmanabhan. So where will Watson turn?
"It would appear that IBM is locked out of maybe a good two-thirds of the patient medical records sitting inside proprietary systems that don't want to play," he wrote. "At least for now."