By Sarianne Gruber
Twitter: @subtleimpact
Read Part I of the Interview
Dr. Kathleen McGroddy Goetz, though she prefers to be called Kathy, describes her career as a journey. A trained academic in healthcare and life sciences with a research perspective, her first aspiration was to do drug discovery. Kathy describes her twenty-three year career at IBM as “fantastic and interesting”. She started in hardware and software, which at the time was on the cusp of joining business and technology, and later moved more into the business development side of research. Now as VP of IBM Watson Health, she is focused on technology and commercialization where “the pace has been very busy”. Kathy has been instrumental in many of new acquisitions and partnerships for IBM Watson Health including Phytel, a population health software, and Softlayer for Cloud Computing. Here is a gently edited recount of our interview.
How is the IBM Watson Health artificial intelligence accessible?
It is really interesting because the other technology journey that has been happening in the world is this advent of cloud computing. When we built Watson in 2011, it was a huge computer system with a very special purpose because we built it to play a game. Initially, we started collaborating around the notion of a system, a single system. But if you think about building this big, great machine with all this knowledge, it’s not really very accessible and not very many people can afford it. Think what has happened with cloud computing (which is accessible and affordable.) IBM actually bought a company called Softlayer, and we are standing up cloud data centers around the world. We decided to take the original Watson system, all that technology, and decompose it into cloud services. Instead of having one special purpose system, you have a cloud. We have natural language processing capabilities to scan, to read text and to do deep Q&A. It’s really exciting. Last year we had our first cloud service stood up and now we have over twenty. We realized to really scale and democratize this; it’s going to be about the ecosystem. No one can transform healthcare alone. It takes a village; it takes the world and it is so complex. Our goal and strategy is to stand up a set of cloud services foundationally with data and knowledge as the core. Then, add various algorithms, insights and cognitive capabilities. With this, there comes the ability to read the text, interpret the text, do retrospective analytics, do predictive analytics and do image analytics. We can look at a medical image and ask if there is a suspicious region of interest? (IBM is adding medical images with the acquisition of Merge Healthcare.
What are the advantages of an IBM Watson Health cloud service system?
The interoperability question of how do you connect data with other data is really critical. Being able to go in and use all those analytics and then build solutions on top of solutions like Phytel. Solutions will come from IBM, many of them will come from IBM working with strategic partners, and then the vast majority will come, we believe, through the broader ecosystem. So we are standing up this open innovation platform with cloud services. We want everyone to come in to play and build solutions, and we think that is the goal. If we can make our technologies available, people can bring their own data. They can potentially use the data we already have access to, the knowledge, and the training that we’ve done in the system. They may want to use some of their own as well and build solutions. But we think that’s the way you can bring these kinds of data driven, machine learning, cognitive, capabilities all together, and then build solutions on top. That’s really the way to get where we need to get to go. And it’s not going to happen with one company doing it. I think of it almost as a giant play ground where people work to together and leveraging our some core capabilities, but together they can create new innovation that wouldn’t be possible alone.
How does IBM Watson Health promote patient engagement?
There is all this patient data being collected from shirts, socks and other instrumented Internet of Things, wearable devices and from the home. Ultimately, the person gives consent to the use of his or her data, and has control of it. I have had some interesting conversations with my colleagues at Phytel, who have a lot of experience in this. On the one hand, the patient needs to be at the center of all this. Yet, on the other hand the practitioner also plays a strong role. The provider really needs to have a relationship with the patient. Especially as the payment models start to shift, providers are bearing more risk. How do we get all of these things connected for patients to own and control all of their data? Also, getting the patients to share the right data with their providers and to work together to make those decisions that result in better outcomes? From what have seen so far, Research Kit (open source software for medical research) has had a phenomenal uptake with folks signing up. Persons, diagnosed with a disease, contribute their data to a research platform to be shared for medical research. Where people today struggle to get participants into clinical trials. I think people want to take more control and be able to have a more active role, but it hasn’t been easy.
What do you see in the near future and what are you excited about most?
We will continue to add strategic partnerships. We have very aggressive growth plans at IBM Watson Health. I think the excitement for me is seeing this network effect start to happen. I really want our platform, as it comes live and it gets out there, to have people start using it. People would collaborate in that environment and generate all sorts of innovation that they would have not thought of on our own. That’s what gets me excited.
Kathleen McGroddy Goetz Ph.D., is Vice President of IBM Watson Health where she leads the technology commercialization and strategic partner relationships for IBM’s new business unit, which was formed in April 2015. In her 23 years at IBM, Kathy has held a variety of senior business development, technology strategy and product management positions spanning research and software. Kathy holds a B.S. in physics from SUNY Binghamton and a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics from Cornell University. Kathy is an avid runner and triathlete. She lives in Ridgefield, CT with her husband and children. MedCity Converge Speaker Bio September 2, 2015