IBM's CEO, Ginni Rometty, says AI will unlock golden era for health

Ginni Rometti, the CEO of IBM, called on health IT leaders to go on the offensive and embrace the potential of cognitive computing to achieve transformational change in areas including, but not limited to, precision medicine, population health management, genomics, diagnosis and clinical decision making. She described cognitive computing as offering the potential to open up a new "golden age" in healthcare, but acknowledged much had to be done to allay people's concerns about privacy, transparency and artificial intelligence costing them their jobs. In her opening keynote at HIMSS 2017 conference in Orlando on Monday, Rometti, said: "I feel this is a profoundly hopeful time." She added: "I hope to persuade you that cognitive healthcare is real and here and can change almost everything about healthcare". Describing IBM's multi-billion investment in Watson cognitive computing as "our next moonshot", she said, "I'd never be so arrogant as to say we can do all of it but working with partners we can and are now helping change parts of healthcare. I think we can transform many parts of healthcare, whether its epidemiology or personalised healthcare.".