Germany's Dr. House Meets IBM Watson

Zürich, Switzerland / Bad Neustadt, Germany - 18 Oct 2016: Today, RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG (RKA), a private hospital group in Germany, has announced, that by the end of the year, it will begin piloting a Watson-powered cognitive assistance system to help support physicians at the group's Centre for Undiagnosed and Rare Diseases located at the University Hospital Marburg. Since it opened in 2013, the renowned Center has been contacted by more than 6,000 patients to visit Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schäfer, a leading expert in rare diseases, who is also known as the "German Dr. House," based on the character of the eponymous American medical television drama. Most of the patients he and his team meets with have year-long medical histories, which include a large amount of unstructured data, such as laboratory tests, clinical reports, drug prescriptions, radiology findings as well as pathology reports. "It's not uncommon for our patients to have thousands of medical documents, leaving us overwhelmed, not only by the large number of patients, but also by the huge amount of data to be reviewed," said Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schäfer, University Hospital Marburg. "This is especially challenging because our work is often like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack -- even the smallest piece of information could lead to an accurate diagnosis."