Watson may be best known as a robotic Jeopardy! champion, but IBM thinks its cognitive computing abilities will be a big winner in the health care sector too.

An investment which capped the $20 million in Series D funding for Modernizing Medicine, a specialty-specific and ICD-10 compliant EMR provider, represents the latest effort from IBM through its $100 million fund to seed Watson innovations.

Modernizing Medicine is used by over 5,000 health care providers in the U.S., among them are roughly 30 percent of all dermatologists — a segment in which the company ranked first in a Black Book Market Research reports.
"Today's announcement is an exciting milestone in our journey to deliver specialty-specific solutions to health care providers, including an entirely new class of cognitive-infused patient care apps powered by Watson," said Daniel Crane, co-founder and CEO of Modernizing Medicine, in a statement.

Modernizing Medicine is expected to use the funding in part to enhance and expand schEMA, a mobile app which will be accessed through the company's primary EMR and leverage Watson's cognitive capabilities in the interest of better, faster treatment at the point of care.

The app will field medical questions asked in natural language, analyze massive amounts of published and peer-reviewed medical data, then return meaningful clinical information to the treating physician within seconds.

In the interest of transforming and optimizing health care, IBM has other Watson collaborations underway with leading hospitals and research organizations. Among them are Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic and New York Genome Center.

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