Healthcare could be transforming, thanks to IBM’s Watson analytics, and recent announcements now have the industry’s attention. Watson could change the way patients receive care, all the way up to the way doctors are paid.

Shahid Shah, cofounder and CEO of Netspective Communications, LLC, shared his perspective with Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during IBM Insight 2015. Shah discussed some of the challenges facing healthcare providers and how Watson could help.

Eliminating inefficiency

The general consensus, according to Shah, is that paying for healthcare in a “fee-for-service” manner just doesn’t work. One major reason for this failure is that the incentives created by this model “rewards physicians for doing more services.” The industry’s thinking is changing, and Shah said that “outcome-driven payments” are where we are moving toward.

Watson enables doctors to provide these outcomes by allowing them the ability to “manage populations” of any size or type and drive patient care and outcomes more easily. The first model “requires little data” and “doesn’t need any analysis,” while the second relies heavily upon having data on what makes someone healthy, Shah explained.

Security and fraud

The value of personal medical record data is much greater, 10x more, than financial records on the market to fraudsters, according to Shah. Those fraudsters are capable of committing greater fraud from the increased amount of information present, because it contains the “most information there is to know” about any individual, he said.

Estimated at between $50 and $350 billion of Medicare fraud occurs per year, and those records can be part of the source, Shah explained. The concerns over securitizing this data are resulting in possible data loss, however, which runs counter using Watson, which requires that information to deliver solutions.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Insight 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE