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AI Case Study

The US Veterans Affairs was able to increase therapy completion rate among war veterans with PTSD by more than six times using machine learning to personalise the program

US Dept of Veterans Affairs has enlisted IBM Watson to develop personalised treatment programs for war veterans with PTSD. Watson ranks the custom treatment options based on clinical data, personal medical history, medical literature etc. Therapy completion rate has gone up from less than 10% to 73%.

Industry

Public And Social Sector

Government

Project Overview

"Many EHRs aren't used to their fullest potential, thanks to discrepancies in how patient data is recorded, collected and organized across healthcare systems and organizations, IBM officials point out. Watson can help correlate what’s in the EHR with medical literature and research articles, making that data more meaningful at the point of care.

The VA will use capabilities of IBM's cloud-based Watson Discovery Advisor to analyze the healthcare data of its patients; the technology aims to reduce the time physicians need to test hypotheses and formulate conclusions that can advance their work – from months to just hours – bringing new levels of speed and precision to research and development.

As part of the VHA's clinical reasoning system, meanwhile, Watson will ingest hundreds of thousands of documents – medical records and research papers – to help physicians deliver better care."

"VA signed a $16 million deal with IBM to use Watson technology to speed medical decision-making for VA physicians and enhance treatment for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Watson returns a set of answers based on the data or questions entered by the physician processing information from medical literature and patient data"

Reported Results

Tiatros Inc teamed with IBM to develop Tiatros Post Traumatic Growth for Veterans program, a psychotherapy program connecting veterans with their peers and providers online and the program has achieved up to 73% completion rate for veterans who begin the PTSD sessions as compared to the previous rate of 10%.

Technology

Function

Strategy

Data Science

Background

"Fewer than 10 percent of veterans with PTSD normally complete a treatment program within a year of being diagnosed, but as many as 80 percent can recover when they do so, according to published Veterans Affairs statistics. VA findings also suggest that one in five of the 3 million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffer from PTSD."

Benefits

Data

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