Cognitive Computing and the Future of Health Care Cognitive Computing and the Future of Healthcare: The Cognitive Power of IBM Watson Has the Potential to Transform Global Personalized Medicine

In this paper, cognitive systems that understand, reason, and learn are helping people expand their knowledge base, improve their productivity, and deepen their expertise. With cognitive computing, we can now see health data that were previously inaccessible, and we can impact the field of health care more than we ever thought possible. Humans generate an enormous amount of health-related data, from our personal fitness trackers and mobile apps to electronic medical records and genomic and clinical research. Unfortunately, much of this information is discarded or underutilized, and a majority of patients do not even have access to their own data. Imagine a world where healthcare professionals could harness the best expertise from world-class doctors to reach the most remote regions and match more patients to life-saving clinical trials. The era of cognitive health care will bring together individual and clinical research and social data from a diverse range of healthcare sources to redefine a patient's path to better health.