Dear AuntMinnie Member,
Two industry giants announced a major partnership today designed to bring artificial intelligence (AI) into routine clinical practice for population health management. IBM's Watson Health unit will provide its AI technology to Siemens Healthineers, which will offer it throughout its extensive customer base around the world.
IBM has been moving aggressively to build its Watson technology -- which first won fame for beating a human at Jeopardy! -- into a viable commercial business. The company is positioning Watson as a tool for analyzing massive amounts of data, a task that's a necessary foundation for population health initiatives.
Through the Siemens alliance, Watson will soon become available to healthcare providers who are using imaging technology to generate massive volumes of data. Learn more about how the deal will work by clicking here, or visit our Imaging Informatics Community at informatics.auntminnie.com.
Slashing DR reject rates
Is your reject rate for digital radiography (DR) studies too high? Do you even know what it is?
Researchers from the University of Chicago were surprised to find out what their DR reject rate was a year after implementing the technology. They launched a quality improvement program to bring the number of rejected DR images down, through interventions such as technologist education and building a centralized database of reject rates by DR machine.
But the task proved to be more stubborn than they expected, in part because their DR machines from different vendors used different data formats for reporting rejects, and this made it difficult to perform department-wide reject analysis. Learn more about their work by clicking here, or visit our Digital X-Ray Community at xray.auntminnie.com.
Patients want radiologists
It seems like more and more physicians from other specialties are coveting medical imaging, but most patients still want their images interpreted by a radiologist. That's according to a new study in our Imaging Leaders Community: Click here for the rest of the story, or go to leaders.auntminnie.com.
