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And also possibly make it harder for doctors to, say, recommend a more expensive procedure because their hospital gets paid more.

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Actually, this seems like the perfect opportunity for pharma companies to "help" in creating the database.

That's actually what they are already doing when pitching new drugs to doctors. Now they only have to convince the system designers and not thousands of practicing doctors.

In the end, the power is going to be with the payors, who are plenty savvy themselves, not the pharma companies.

Drugs are a relatively small part (10-15%) of the overall cost of healthcare.

Most new drugs today win on marketing, rather than efficacy. Once you have a system like watson, it's rather trivial to do the expected value calculation of "This treatment has an X% chance of working, and costs Y. The competing treatment has X'%, and costs Y'."

As long as that data is available to patients (and it should be), I'm with the parent poster, this will make it harder to pad treatments.

The customers for the software are the hospitals that people go to, not the insurance companies or the patients. I guarantee you that the hospitals will prefer whatever option results in the best possible financial outcomes for themselves.

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