Ed. Note: The following is a summary of a presentation by Dr. Samuel Nussbaum on progress in the Watson in Healthcare program announced in February. An in-depth article based on this presentation and a SiliconAngle interview with Dr. Nussbaum will be published next week.

After two years of development that resembles human education as much as it does programming, Watson, the first virtual intelligence, is entering medical practice says Dr. Samuel R. Nussbaum, EVP for Clinical Health Policy and Chief Medical Officer of Wellpoint Inc. Its impact on outcomes, medical costs, and efficiency will be revolutionary.

Today doctors spend less than a quarter of their time with patients, and nearly half of prescribed procedures are ineffective, Dr. Nussbaum told the crowd at IBM Edge in the General Session Tuesday. By delivering procedure recommendations based on comparing the patient’s longitudinal medical record and genetic and epigenetic data to the entire corpus of medical knowledge on the patient’s condition, it will help doctors design a custom treatment plan for each patient that maximizes that patient’s chance for a successful outcome. Since February, when IBM announced the Watson in healthcare initiative, oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Institute have started using Watson as a diagnostic tool with lung and breast cancer patients.

Wellpont, a major medical insurer, is beginning to use Watson to speed treatment preauthorizations. By year’s end half the nurses at Wellpoint will be using Watson, which will streamline the preauthorization process for these diseases, cutting a major source of costs in the program and freeing the oncologists to spend more of their time with patients and less talking to insurers. As the Watson program is expanded to other diseases such as diabetes, it will have a major impact on reducing the cost of medical care. That Dr. Nussbaum said, will have a positive impact on the society at large as the huge rise in healthcare costs is stealing money from other programs from road maintenance to education.

The main problem driving those costs is complexity, he said. The latest research shows, for instance, that breast cancer is not one disease but several, including genetic abnormalities. Each of these requires a different treatment regimen. And because each individual reacts differently to treatments, they need to be optimized for the individual patient. At the same time, medical knowledge is increasing at a pace that no human can keep up with. Watson, as the first true artificial intelligence, can. By bringing that understanding of the entire corpus of evidence-based medicine and the individual patient’s medical needs to bear at the point of care, it can ensure that each patient gets the best, most appropriate care that medical science can provide.