I'm an MD, and I dabble in programming and AI/DL. While I don't really care much about Watson in particular, the pervasiveness of the "enter healthcare = death" equation is worrisome to me. And it should worry you, too.
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.
I work for a medical software company which evaluated Watson for use in our diagnostic product.
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.
I think this has more to do with the fact that Watson sucks than anything else, although it may be a harbinger for other efforts to sprinkle magic machine-learning pixie dust on complex problems in the hope for a solution.
Many of those barriers have historical reasons for existing -- which do you think could be lowered without risking patient health (or yielding sufficient benefit to be worth some added risk)?
The two massive barriers to entry are regulatory uncertainty and sales difficulties
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.
IBM is a confusing one. For a while I was getting IBM powered blockchain ads coming through my Instagram feed, and I seem to remember stopping by their booth at Dreamforce a few years ago where Watson would help determine what candy they'd give you (or something like that). One thing I'd be interested to know is what they actually do vs. the marketing spin of what they do.
I also used to work for Watson. It remains one of the best jobs I've had. There's a number of useful services available through Watson on the IBM Cloud. I'm a little biased toward Watson Assistant which can be nicely customized and integrated with other solutions to create some terrific customized virtual agents. You can also easily train natural language systems using Knowledge Studio.
I helped build that candy machine demo! It was admittedly kind of silly, but it was fun to do.
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.
It seems Watson was founded on the false premise that lots of hand coded things could be called an “AI”. It’s the victim of its own winter, because it was never going to live up to its own hype.
This isn't really anything to do with machine learning, and just IBM's inability to bring innovation to market (particularly in industry solutions.)
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.
My friend who survived the layoffs indicated that this was due to in large part changes in the political/regulatory landscape that made it so the companies they were working with would no longer require the features that IBM was providing.
Watson could never really deliver on the AI healthcare integration and diagnostic support. Basically it became a status symbol for hospitals to have, but it was dead weight. https://www.statnews.com/2017/09/05/watson-ibm-cancer/
I was hired by an acquired Watson Health division a little over a year ago, and after seeing the very confusing story of how IBM expects to grow and strengthen these disparate companies, I'm not surprised. I'm also saddened that some of my former colleagues were among those laid off.
Is there a full breakdown of scope anywhere? I know there have been major complaints about Watson Health before, but I still can't tell if this marks a retreat from the program, or just a harsher-than-usual instance of the sort of layoffs pretty common for acquisitions.
> “The message was that there are about 7,000 people in Watson Health today and this was a cost-cutting exercise. 90 days’ notice with 30 days’ severance.”
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.
I am flabbergasted by your reaction. This is the most IBM-like thing I have ever read. I'd be shocked if I wasn't reading this about IBM.
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.
Not surprising. Many “tech” companies enter the field with arrogance, thinking of course they can do health better. They unfortunately often have no comprehension of the regulatory regimes for the markets they enter and therefore the projects are doomed to failure before they start.
No need for employees when Watson can do it all. Unbeknownst to these people, they renamed it Watson Health due to the fact Watson is going to run the entire division itself. Amazing! The future of AI is finally here! Watson has spent the last few years learning all these peoples' jobs.
phren0logy|7 years ago
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.
criley2|7 years ago
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.
bitwize|7 years ago
ISL|7 years ago
Thriptic|7 years ago
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.
seem_2211|7 years ago
pridkett|7 years ago
nfriedly|7 years ago
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.
oliviergg|7 years ago
TaylorAlexander|7 years ago
krona|7 years ago
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.
randominternets|7 years ago
downrightmike|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
belthesar|7 years ago
mathattack|7 years ago
https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-watchdog-launches...
Bartweiss|7 years ago
mlthoughts2018|7 years ago
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.
throwaway5752|7 years ago
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.
dudus|7 years ago
redshirt|7 years ago
Lendal|7 years ago
GavinMcG|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
BogdanPetre|7 years ago