San Francisco start-up Tiatros, a doctor-driven, patient-centered social network, has joined the IBM Watson Ecosystem, the companies announced March 2 at HIMSS16.

Tiatros was designed to allow physicians, with the consent of patients, to create a social network around the patient, including all doctors involved in their treatment and their family members.

The first user of the platform was the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco. UCSF hopes to leverage Watson to analyze personality insights for more personalized treatment, officials say.

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Currently, UCSF is using Tiatros to address the behavioral health needs of young veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq to keep all parties connected to the patient – whether family or multiple providers – in the loop.

"The real measure of how a patient is doing is the story they tell, not the boxes they check; that tells part of the story, not the whole story," said Kim Norman, MD, psychiatry professor, UCSF. "I think the online treasure trove of data in clinical practice is in the unstructured data and the story it tells.

"I feel Watson gives you the tool to really analyze and extract that data, patient by patient and aggregate that data to really understand populations," he added.

Data is entered in increments of 2,000 words through an essay format or using the most recent text messages from a patient. With the addition of Watson, the platform can analyze the information to accurately assess the personality traits, human values and needs of a patient.

For veterans, this means Watson can determine patients with pre-imposed personality traits to be the most resilient in preventing posttraumatic stress disorders and those more likely to respond to an intervention, Norman said. Furthermore, interventions can be modified to match the traits.

Additionally, Watson analytics can provide themes and allow providers to measure how patients are doing based on their stories.

Twitter: @JessiefDavis

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