Mar 29, 2018, 5:58 PM ETInterview, Fireside Chat

Deborah DiSanzo: Solving the World’s Health Problems of the Future

Deborah DeSanza moved from a traditional healthcare executive role to IBM Watson Health to pursue "new things" and disrupt the industry with emerging technologies.
Her initial hesitation to join IBM, a technology firm, was overcome after witnessing IBM Research's advanced capabilities in reading medical images and electronic health records (EHR).
DeSanza joined specifically to marry IBM's AI and cloud technology with deep healthcare domain expertise to accelerate innovation.

Mayo Clinic: Implementation of Watson Clinical Trial Matching reduced the time to match breast cancer patients to clinical trials from an average of 30 minutes to 8 minutes per patient.
Adoption Rate: Last year, 100% of new breast cancer patients at Mayo Clinic were processed through Watson matching, compared to very few prior to implementation.
Drug Discovery: "Watson for Drug Discovery" accelerates the identification of molecular targets, reducing the timeline from 18 months to under 12 weeks.
Pharmacovigilance: Partnerships like the one with Celgene utilize AI to process adverse event reports, reducing human error rates in dispositioning hundreds of thousands of events.
Research Efficiency: The AI addresses the data overload where 8,000 drug research papers are published daily, a volume far exceeding a researcher's capacity to read 300 annually.

Life Sciences: Primary adoption focuses on front-end research, specifically target identification and adverse event coordination.
Payers (Insurers/Governments): Adoption centers on aggregating large patient databases to identify effective treatment paths for chronic diseases and lower costs.
Providers: Hospitals and clinics prioritize tools to improve radiology reading, support oncologists, and assist primary care physicians with cost reduction.

Data Preparation Reality: DeSanza notes that while organizations claim millions of records, most data is unstructured and requires extensive cleaning and curation before predictive analysis is viable.
Health Transformation Alliance: A consortium of 40+ major U.S. companies (e.g., Boeing, Coca-Cola) managing 6 million patient records utilizes IBM's cloud and CVS for data analytics to improve employee care.
Amazon, JPMorgan, Berkshire Consortium: This separate group manages 1 million patient records with Amazon providing cloud and data analytics infrastructure.
Strategic Goal: Aggregating these pools enables the creation of dynamic patient cohorts to derive real-world evidence that lowers care costs and improves outcomes.

Physician Burnout: Approximately 50% of physicians are experiencing burnout, driving a shortage of providers and longer wait times (e.g., a primary care appointment waiting from October to July).
EHR Impact: Medical professionals report that EHR usage consumes time needed for patient interaction, with one anecdote citing a nurse spending 10 minutes inputting data while a patient was days from death.
Projected Solution: DeSanza predicts that within three years, AI will augment physician intelligence to restore eye contact and direct patient interaction by reducing EHR administrative burdens.

Data Protection: IBM employs HIPAA and GDPR-compliant, large-scale teams to anonymize and protect patient data daily.
Millennial Perspective: DeSanza observes that millennials may prioritize finding the right cure over strict data privacy concerns.
Patient Ownership: The stated ideal is a model where patients retain full ownership of their data and can choose to share it, contrasting with current institutional hoarding of data.
Core Philosophy: DeSanza cites advice from HeartStream founder Carl Morgan: "Focus on saving lives and the money will come," a strategy validated by the market explosion following the first public defibrillator saving a flight attendant's life in 1997.

Favorite Leader: DeSanza identifies IBM Chairman Ginni Rometty as her top leader, crediting her with transforming 50% of IBM over the last three years through investments in Watson, Cloud, and quantum computing.
Technology Evolution: Under Rometty, IBM has shifted from a legacy hardware focus to becoming a leader in AI, cloud, and quantum technologies.