Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Six Years And Billions Of Dollars Later, Dream Of Watson Being Able To Cure Cancer Is Withering
The Wall Street Journal: IBM Has A Watson Dilemma
Can Watson cure cancer? That’s what International Business Machines Corp. asked soon after its artificial-intelligence system beat humans at the quiz show “Jeopardy!” in 2011. Watson could read documents quickly and find patterns in data. Could it match patient information with the latest in medical studies to deliver personalized treatment recommendations? (Hernandez and Greenwald, 8/11)
In other health and technology news —
Bloomberg: Sensors To Smartphones Bring Patent Wars To Diabetes Monitoring
Diabetes treatment has evolved since Mary Fortune was diagnosed in 1967 and hospitalized because there was no reliable way monitor her blood sugar. These days, a glucose skin patch transmits her levels day and night to her iPhone and shares the data with others. Fortune and other diabetics are benefiting from an explosion in technology and innovation, from under-the-skin sensors that eliminate the need for painful finger pricks, to smartphone alerts when glucose levels rise too high. But the technology, and its integration with mobile devices, has brought the types of lawsuits typically seen by Silicon Valley companies. (Decker, 8/11)
CQ: Patient Monitors At Hospitals Could Be Hacked, McAfee Says
Monitoring systems in hospitals that track patients’ vital signs such as heartbeat, blood pressure and oxygen levels are susceptible to hacking, the security research firm McAfee said in a report released over the weekend. The weakness is that such data is typically sent over unencrypted networks to a central monitoring station, which helps doctors and nurses keep an eye on dozens of patients at once. (Ratnam, 8/13)
