Tiatros, a San Francisco-based healthcare startup has joined the IBM Watson Health Ecosystem. The partnership enables Tiatros to expand the services of CarePod, its patient-physician social network platform, using IBM Watson's cognitive computing applications.
CarePod allows physicians to construct care teams for patients by adding clinicians to their social networks. The service is designed to allow patients better access to medical and wellness advice on a regular basis, rather than just when they seek treatment at a hospital or clinic. The app uses calendaring, video chat technology and other social media-standard communications as well. The real-time patient-care team communication will give providers a better understanding of lifestyle and social determinants that may impact an individual's health, according to the developers.
"Understanding the impact of social determinants on a patient's health requires numerous real-time conversations with lots of different people that doctors simply don't have time for in today's health system. Tiatros helps address this, and helps facilitate and record a type of ongoing care conversation," Kimberlie Cerrone, CEO of Tiatros, said in a statement announcing the partnership. "Tiatros incorporates Watson cognitive computing to more easily unearth care insights from unstructured data. We then integrate it into the broader patient record, which has proven to dramatically increase a physician's ability to positively influence patient's health outcomes."
Tiatros also announced a study in collaboration with the University of California San Francisco that will leverage IBM Watson's Personality Insights application programming interface to study post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans. The goal of the research is to examine Tiatros' ability to identify PTSD and other disorders in those returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan.