[Advocacy Advisors] Wikipedia and ethics in medicine

[James Heilman]

For trivia and simply Jeopardy style questions yes Wikipedia is King. I am
sure this version of Watson would not rely on Wikipedia. There are much
better sources out there for medical content. Anyway who would base an
expert system for medicine on Wikipedia would be a fool. I am sure the
people at IBM are not.

James Heilman



On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 11:59 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Recently IBM announced that their Watson natural language processing
> system will be used for "utilization management" decisions in lung
> cancer treatment by health insurance company WellPoint at Memorial
> Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center.
>
> I would like to urge everyone to review
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilization_management -- it seems very
> likely that Watson will be making treatment decisions similar to those
> which have colloqually been rerred to as "death panel" decisions in
> the US over the past four years.
>
> The IBM Watson team has frequently stated that they rely on Wikipedia
> in essentially all of their interpretation and question answering
> processing, more than any other source.
>
> What are the legal liability issues involved with an artificial
> intelligence system based on Wikipedia making life-or-death medical
> decisions?
>



-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian

The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
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