There's a lot of potential for good applications of this type of tech in healthcare, but the barriers to actually getting it off the ground strangle it in the crib.
It should be seen as a Good Thing that medical is a Serious Field where Non-Serious Ideas get run through the ringer and fail.
And that's what happened with Watson.
The word from our engineers was that Watson was designed to sell commercials, not be a useful tool in a problem space like differential diagnosis or drug reactions.
I think this is good. Financial has the same reputation. You can't just use agile to bust out a minimum viable medical or financial product. You will be chewed up and spit out. And rightfully so. Because when it comes to our health, or our money and our investments, we don't have tolerance for failure.
OK, my social network double posted my communication, annoying but it's just a communication. However "my financial tool just double posted a transaction", or "my prescriptions tool just doubled the dose of a medicine" -- these are not OK states at all.
I wish Watson lived up to the hype, but sadly, our experience was that it does not. So it failing out of Healthcare isn't a surprise to us, nor is it a bad thing.
This is the number one thing to remember about Watson. I've worked with teams within IBM that spent years and thousands upon thousands of man-hours trying to get it to be useful in a fairly well-defined, constrained use-case. Eventually they bailed and went to what was essentially a simple decision tree. It hits it out of the park on the sexy buzz-words, but I'm ready to curse the whole field for giving customers wildly inflated expectations.
Next industry to keep an eye on (many are already) is automotive. There are a lot of vendors trying to put a lot of software/connectivity into the next generation of cars. Lots of regulation but I will opt for a dumb car over new smart stuff any day.
Same with a lot of different traditionally embedded systems that are now being connected to the internet
I work in the diagnostic imaging space, we are working on integrating AI for assisted diagnosis or screening. It's a several-year road map for some base function.
We had a top sales executive leave for IBM Watson Healthcare division about a year ago, was very proud to be part of what Watson was going to bring to healthcare
He's been working back at my company, couldn't stand selling lies (and wasn't making much commission with canceled contracts).
From a named company more impressed with what Google deepmind has done with NHS
I care about this mostly from the perspective of treating patients. Beyond training sets for AI, I need those records for the same reason: to make appropriate and informed treatment decisions.
From the outside looking in, it's the kind of situation that begs companies to over-promise on results to get enough money to even give it a shot.
Regulations: Up until recently, the regulatory landscape for medical software was extremely confusing. People were sitting on the sidelines waiting for FDA to figure out how to deal with machine learning, agile development, app stores, blah blah. Startups that wanted to jump in were staring at yearly 100K+ regulatory consultant bills. FDA is now actively de-regulating the bulk of medical software, and will create a regulatory kit which should better explain the regulations in an actionable way (instead of "create a design history file" without much explanation of wtf that means in practice). This should ease pains on that front
Sales: This is where the big pain is. Getting paid for shit in healthcare is just too damn hard unless your product is on the hospital operations side of things. Getting an FDA approval (assuming it's required) DOES NOT mean one of the thousands of insurers will decide to reimburse you for your product; many require multiple clinical trials for reimbursement purposes; and many will decide to stop covering your product for stupid reasons (ie some editorial in the "No One Reads This Journal of Nonsense" said it was unclear the product was effective). Good luck getting patients to pay for anything, as they expect all products to be covered by insurance. Good luck convincing doctors they should use your product, as they are already overwhelmed with data entry / shitty UIs and don't want to perform any additional clicks or workflow changes.
Also, software which cannot meet CMS reg and cannot be used for Medicare/Medicaid patients is a non-starter for the majority of the healthcare industry.
The idea that our medical software space would be mostly deregulated is a rather horrifying thing in and of itself. I don't want my father being cared for using beta, buggy, software. I have high expectations for quality and risk management from healthcare software that I do not have for some agile beta video game or social network.
I think your "bulk deregulation" comment is rather wrong. If you are coding in this space and are not INTIMATELY familiar with the concept of PHI and HIPAA, then you will be writing software which violates core regulations in this space.
Your concerns on the sales side also do not mention "RISK" even once. You don't speak even a little bit of our healthcare space. Those doctors want risk management. What happens if/when the software screws up? Whose fault is it that the software is literally response for killing patients? You also don't mention what doctors care about: does it meet CMS regs? Does it meet state regs? Will I be able to submit my obscure XYZ state form? Will I be able to submit to BCBS, Aetna, Medicare? Will they accept? Etc etc. You will be writing custom software for customers all over, because the regulations that states and even cities like NYC might impose could be imposed on a single customer of yours only.
I think people who want to disrupt healthcare forget that healthcare IT is literally life or death. Your bug isn't just an annoyance, it could be the thing that ends someones life. Regulations aren't just a barrier to agile development, they're also a life saving tool to ensure that risk management and data privacy are established in all products that get used on patients in our country.
Sadly IBM has changed a lot and I ended up in a different role not too long after, and then leaving the company entirely a year or so later.
To answer your question, though, one of the things Watson actually did was pretty powerful speech-to-text and text-to-speech engines. Out of the box they were approaching the best in the business, and with some customisation they could beat any other solution available for purchase. It was also far easier to use in a web browser than any of the competition (I'm biased here - I wrote a lot of that code - but I don't believe I'm wrong.)
I really enjoyed working with that part of Watson.
Participating in Jeopardy was quite an achievement, but to extrapolate that system and selling it as a "solve all" is to over promise.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607965/a-reality-check-fo...
edit: "trough of disillusionment" is what I was looking for
What would you expect from a company run like a hedge fund by a bunch of marketing hacks? Half the original Watson research fellows and executives have left to start their own companies, having seen the writing on the wall years ago.
https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-watchdog-launches...
If accurate, that severance benefit is just shameful, and simply not good enough from a large corporation. Absolutely no excuse for that degree of unjustifiable, unmitigated greed to offer so little when possibly damaging lives, especially for older workers who may face IBM-like ageism elsewhere now too.
Hard fought career advice I’ve learned: always negotiate adequate severance.
It should be a heck of a lot more than 1 month, even if you’re a junior employee. Just turn down jobs if they won’t give substantial severance agreements. Unless you’re in dire straits & have to take the job. Otherwise, don’t do it. That employer will not consider the impact that some surprise layoff has on you. Get it in writing, up front in the negotiation, and don’t waste time with firms that won’t offer it. Not worth it.
You're not going to get changes to your employment contract there from negotiating, that's magical thinking. And they will lay you off (sorry, RA you) without a second thought. The answer is "never work for IBM", and if you do, know this will eventually happen to you and plan around it.
In general, you should ask if you’ll be required to sign any NDA, non-compete, or non-disparagement agreements, either as part of a company handbook or as standalone documents. If so, the severance package should be commensurate with the duration and condition of those.
It is common to negotiate severance equal to your salary for the duration covered by the agreements, or at least a large fraction like 30-50% of the duration, so a competitive severance package would certainly be in the range of 4-6 months of your base salary.
You can also negotiate to have company-paid insurance benefits extend past your termination date as part of severance, to avoid needing COBRA in the US.
The severance agreement should also cover anything like a company issued laptop, etc., if you are promised you can keep it after employment ends.
To get this, they’ll likely require you to sign waivers to any additional monetary claims, and draconian IP, NDA, etc., agreements. And this is why you should force the issue of negotiating severance up front and why you should walk away from companies (like IBM) that won’t negotiate.
Otherwise, they’ll announce the restructuring or layoff and then hold you over a barrel, by claiming you have to honor their company policy non-compete anyway, and pressure you to sign restrictive documents at your HR exit meeting, generally offering some insultingly low severance benefit, like only a few weeks or months of pay and no continuation of benefits.
All of this advice is specifically for junior-level employees as well. Never let anyone treat you like you cannot negotiate severance just because you’re a junior employee. Walk away from those companies.
For experienced employees, the amount of severance should absolutely be at least 6 months of pay and continued company-paid health coverage, and in many cases you can negotiate for it to fully match the duration of the non-compete or NDAs, usually 12 months.
Above all, don’t accept any baloney nonsense about “standard policies” restricting severance to a small number of weeks of pay per each year of tenure, or any of that garbage.
That’s just the standard line they feed to people who don’t negotiate. And if a company refuses to be flexible on it, walk away.
