If you’re in the business of collecting and using healthcare data to improve patient outcomes, have I got a treat for you.

http://medgroup.biz/big-data-healthcare-transformation

That’s a link to the complete 10x talk by Dr. Marty Kohn, formerly the Chief Medical Scientist for IBM’s Watson, now the Chief Medical Scientist for Jointly Health.

It’s hard to summarize all the salient points for you but here are three points that really stuck out for me:

First, if you measure, record, and store health data, how do you make sure it gets used?

Second, the former administrator for CMS published a paper about waste in healthcare and concluded 34% of what we spend in healthcare is valueless.

And third, in 2010, the National Library of Medicine cataloged 699,000 new articles. Marty joked, “I didn’t read them all.”

“If I had a tool that could read all 699,000 articles and pull out ideas I could use to make a better decision for a specific patient, that would be pretty helpful.”

In essence, that’s what IBM’s Watson does.

He went further: Watson is going to be extended to other areas of healthcare. It addresses free text, natural language, journal articles, guidelines, the narrative part of the electronic health record.

For today’s discussion, how will your company use big data analytics to improve patient outcomes?

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BONUS TALK:

Ken Ritterspach (iQdecisions) and Christopher Buschmann (SurModics) immediately followed Marty’s talk.

They shared how medical device company SurModics is mining data to its best advantage. In essence, big data analytics can improve your bottom line, too.

See http://medgroup.biz/medical-device-company-analytics for the video and transcript.

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Discussions This Week:

Any medical devices grandfathered from UDI ruling?
http://bit.ly/UDI-grandfathered

Onshoring or Offshoring for Medical Device Manufacturing?
http://bit.ly/On-or-Off

Would you trust your development records to the cloud?
http://bit.ly/cloud-trust

2D barcodes – Anyone using these for production control of pre-printed labels?
http://bit.ly/2D-or-not-2D-that-is-the-question
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Make it a great week.

Joe Hage
Medical Devices Group Leader

P.S. You’re welcome to send the links to the talks to your network.