“They call each other for consultations,” said Silobrcic. “Or they might look something up on the Web or open a textbook. But wouldn’t it be terrific if they had a tool that could sift through vast quantities of information and come back with suggestions – with options?”

Paul Ricci, chairman and CEO of Nuance, said the technology “will introduce unmatched clinical information and analytic technological advancements for healthcare.” He said “the solutions we are developing with IBM will transform the capture, flow and use of clinical data, empowering healthcare organizations to drive smarter, more efficient clinical and business decisions.”

“I’m very excited about Watson's potential,” said Eliot Siegel, MD, director of the Maryland Imaging Research Technologies Laboratory at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Watching Jeopardy, he said, “I was really amazed, along with the rest of the world, at how accurately and rapidly Watson was able to respond to the complex questions that often involved wordplay or puns in a way that seemed to give the impression of an understanding of the meaning of the question.”

Siegel said Watson could first be used to flag safety errors or inconsistencies in the EMR, such as patients on wrong or conflicting medications. As the technology evolves, he said it could “begin to suggest diagnostic tests or even therapies” or “perform real time interaction with the physician while she or he is seeing a patient – in the ER, for example.”

Silobrcic said Watson's healthcare applications are “still in development” and at least a year or two away from “supporting clinicians from day to day.”

As researchers fine-tune its uses, “there’s talk of focusing Watson on certain smaller domains,” such as oncology or cardiology, he said. “By virtue of limiting the domain, one might be able to more quickly exercise all the capabilities that Watson has in a more constrained space.”

Silobrcic said it’s “very conceivable that even a physician office in a rural area might be able to access Watson as a resource through cloud computing” or that “a very large integrated delivery network might decide to have a version of their own.”

“Watson has the potential to help doctors reduce the time needed to evaluate and determine the correct diagnosis for a patient,” said Herbert Chase, MD, professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. “We also believe that Watson also has the ability to help doctors provide personalized treatment options that are tailored to an individual patient’s needs.”

Ultimately, said Siegel, “I have little doubt that technology like Watson’s will be routinely used for safety, surveillance and diagnostic assistance in the next 10 years and am excited to see the renaissance in ‘artificial intelligence’ in medicine.”