MetaMed is designed to extract the maximal amount of information out of the medical research community that exists today. Much of their value-add involves ‘meta’ evidence that is difficult for others to collect or interpret. (A doctor may be skilled at understanding how a part of the body works, but not how the medical research community actually works.) If you have a condition that is serious, rare, or strange enough that investing $5k in making medical attention more effective seems like a good idea, then you should talk to MetaMed. MetaMed is in no way a substitute for doctors; it’s a way to find which doctors you should be talking to, and about what.
Watson can be a substitute for doctors. The key enabler for Watson is massive amounts of data on patients, and the statistical knowledge to make good use of that data. One of the things to remember here is that expert diagnosis systems have been around for a long time, but that if you’re expert enough to prepare the relevant information for the computer you’re probably expert enough to make an okay guess yourself, at which point using the computer doesn’t seem very high priority. Eventually, Watson will enable patients and nurses to input most of the necessary information using natural language. It doesn’t look like Watson is a substitute for medical research, but is rather a complement to it- if you have all the patient data together, you can build great models, and great models allow for superior discoveries. (Watson might eventually be able to automate parts of the hypothesis-generating and testing aspects of medical research, but I expect humans to have strong to moderate comparative advantage here for at least two decades.)
The short version: MetaMed makes better use of existing evidence that anyone else; Watson will generate a river of new evidence that will dramatically alter all parts of medicine.
My view:
MetaMed is designed to extract the maximal amount of information out of the medical research community that exists today. Much of their value-add involves ‘meta’ evidence that is difficult for others to collect or interpret. (A doctor may be skilled at understanding how a part of the body works, but not how the medical research community actually works.) If you have a condition that is serious, rare, or strange enough that investing $5k in making medical attention more effective seems like a good idea, then you should talk to MetaMed. MetaMed is in no way a substitute for doctors; it’s a way to find which doctors you should be talking to, and about what.
Watson can be a substitute for doctors. The key enabler for Watson is massive amounts of data on patients, and the statistical knowledge to make good use of that data. One of the things to remember here is that expert diagnosis systems have been around for a long time, but that if you’re expert enough to prepare the relevant information for the computer you’re probably expert enough to make an okay guess yourself, at which point using the computer doesn’t seem very high priority. Eventually, Watson will enable patients and nurses to input most of the necessary information using natural language. It doesn’t look like Watson is a substitute for medical research, but is rather a complement to it- if you have all the patient data together, you can build great models, and great models allow for superior discoveries. (Watson might eventually be able to automate parts of the hypothesis-generating and testing aspects of medical research, but I expect humans to have strong to moderate comparative advantage here for at least two decades.)
The short version: MetaMed makes better use of existing evidence that anyone else; Watson will generate a river of new evidence that will dramatically alter all parts of medicine.
[Emphasis mine]
Dear Bayes, I hope not! I’d hope there’s much more precise info that could be input instead.
The question is not what’s most useful for the system, but what’s most useful for the user.