ARMONK, NY  – The ease with which IBM’s Watson computer dispatched its human opponents on Jeopardy! this past February was something to behold. Indeed, for those inclined to wonder darkly about the eventual obsolescence of homo sapiens, it may have been a bit disconcerting.

But Watson only wants to help mankind. Or would, were he actually a sentient being. Which, of course, he’s not. But the advanced technology at work in the supercomputer could have a transformative impact on healthcare delivery.

That’s why so many people are excited that IBM and Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications are partnering to explore how Watson’s deep question answering, natural language processing and machine learning capabilities – combined with Nuance’s speech recognition and clinical language understanding technology – could help support clinicians in the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

Having enlisted the Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine to help identify Watson’s usefulness, the companies hope the first commercial offerings from their collaboration will be available within two years.

Watson’s ability to glean meaning from written or spoken information and put it into context could be revolutionary.

Because, while all computers are good at dealing with numeric variables, “this is technology that can leverage unstructured data,” said Josko Silobrcic, MD, associate partner at IBM Research and a professor at Harvard University School of Public Health, in an interview at HIMSS11. “It can leverage text and 'human form' communication, which is huge. That’s what data look like in healthcare. Tremendous amount of it – some of the most important stuff – is in textual form.”

That capability allows Watson “to take a tremendous amount of baseline information” – such as medical textbooks and periodicals – “that directly impact healthcare” and digest and contextualize it.

It can then combine that knowledge with the acquired experience of a particular healthcare delivery organization and, most importantly, a particular patient’s medical history – potentially providing clinical decision support for doctors.

“The volume of healthcare information is increasing tremendously and probably accelerating,” sayid Silobrcic. (Consider, for example, advances in genomics, which has led to a huge uptick in data complexity.) “That exceeds the training of healthcare providers, as well as their ability to keep up with it. We all know how busy clinicians are.”

Watson’s value lies in its ability to sift through this evolving knowledge base dynamically – shifting and refining its understanding. Medicine is fraught with ambiguity. Physicians, unsure of the precise diagnosis or treatment for a patient, routinely seek out ways to help inform their decisions.