One of the most exciting, if expected, pieces of news from the IBM Edge conference in early June was the announcement by Samuel Nussbaum, MD, EVP of Clinical Health Policy & Chief Medical Officer at WellPoint, that IBM Watson is being used to treat lung and breast cancer patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and to streamline treatment preauthorizations at WellPoint. Dr. Nussbaum predicts that the impact over the next few years will be revolutionary. If his predictions are accurate, as they appear to be, Watson may become a mandatory part of medical practice worldwide in this decade.

He presented some startling statistics about medicine in the United States in the Tuesday General Session: U.S. physicians spend only 12% of their time with patients. Much of the rest of their time goes to paperwork & dealing with medical payers like WellPoint, in particular in obtaining preauthorizations for the treatments. This is often a lengthy process, in some cases taking weeks and involving several experts, driving up the cost of healthcare. But Dr. Nussbaum defended them as the best way we have to ensure that the treatment prescribed is the best available.

But it isn’t working. He also said studies show that today patients only get the right treatment 55% of the time. “So how many of you when you go to your physician, … flip a coin. Because that’s the likelihood that you’ll get the right care.”

The result, he says, is huge waste that harms patients and drives up the cost of healthcare. Today the United States spends $2.6 billion on healthcare. In the last decade, while the average household income in the country has risen just 7%, the average cost of healthcare per household has at least doubled. According to a study by the Institute of Medicine, at least a third of that money is wasted, and outcomes in the U.S. lag other industrialized countries. This is taking funding from education, programs for the poor, cultural programs, and indeed all aspects of the culture.

One of the main causes of this waste & inefficiency, he said, is the growing complexity of medical treatment. Breast cancer, for instance, isn’t one disease but several. The kind of breast cancer that is caused by an over-expression of a single gene that regulates the multiplication of cells requires an entirely different treatment from the cancer caused by human papilloma virus. Then treatments need to be modified to meet the overall condition, needs, and genetics of the patient. And it needs to be based on the latest research, which is often humanly impossible given the sheer volume of new research flooding the medical field.

“Discovery doesn’t always lead to innovation,” he says. The hardest working specialists can only absorb, understand, and incorporate so much new information into their treatment regimens, and studies show that it can take as long as a decade for a medical innovation to become part of standard practice.

Watson, Dr. Nussbaum says, promises to change all that, simultaneously ensuring that the best treatment is given to every patient and cutting the waste and time from the treatment process. No human can absorb all the new medical discoveries coming from the research labs today. Watson, which runs on a Big Data system and has been trained in all the nuances of medical practice, can.

In an interview with SiliconAngle later that day, Dr. Nussbaum said, “Every nation is trying to understand how to advance value in healthcare no matter what they’re paying for it, & part of advancing value is knowing what treatments work & how they can be effectively applied, because every system has its gaps and deficiencies in care.”

Watson can solve that part of the medical problem. In the medical practice, Watson can design treatment strategies based on sophisticated analysis of all the available research, including the latest advances in treatment and the entire corpus of experience at Memorial Sloan-Kettering applied to that patient’s longitudinal patient record, genetics, & epigenetics and latest test results, including the genetics of that person’s individual cancer. It can deliver a choice of personalized treatment plans based on that analysis, rated according to their percentage chance of delivering the optimal patient outcome, at the point of care, allowing the doctor and patient to then choose the strategy to implement together. At the payer, Watson can deliver the same analysis to the nurse charged with preauthorizing treatment for that patient, eliminating the need for weeks of human review and in many cases allowing immediate or very quick authorization of the treatment chosen by the doctor and patient.

Watson has only gone “live” in the last three months at Sloan-Kettering and its satellites and at WellPoint, and so far has only been used in a few cases and only in breast and lung cancers. But already, Dr. Nussbaum said, Watson has caused a change in recommended treatment in at least one case where it designed a strategy with a higher chance of successful outcome than the one the oncologist, a leading expert, originally recommended. As more people are trained in its use, and as it is applied to more diseases, Dr. Nussbaum predicts, it will have a dramatic positive impact on improving patient outcomes and cutting medical costs, both by streamlining preauthorizations and other administrative processes and eliminating the waste caused by ineffective treatment.

He also speculated that Watson will eventually be used to prevent the development of common diseases such as heart disease and diabetes in individuals. Within this decade, he predicted, the cost of sequencing the full genetic makeup of individuals will drop to the point that every person’s longitudinal patient record will include that individual’s full genetic makeup. Watson will analyze that data to identify the specific health problems that patient is most likely to develop over time, allowing a primary care physician to work with the individual to design preventative strategies that could delay or even prevent the disease from developing at all.

What he didn’t say is that it also will decrease medical malpractice by ensuring that all treatment follows the best practice. Given the expected impact of Watson on patient outcomes, it is easy to envision a day when patients will bring medical malpractice suits against institutions that do not use Watson primarily because they did not, regardless of actual treatment outcome. That and the other advantages Dr. Nussbaum predicts will mandate that medical providers and insurers worldwide adopt Watson as part of their basic treatment strategy, revolutionizing the practice of medicine in the 21st century.