I had the pleasure of sitting and having a conversation with Anita Govindjee from the IBM Watson Healthcare group at HIMSS. I was lucky to have snagged a seat at the same table while we both ate our lunch during one of the days of the show. She shared some of the exciting work they’re doing at IBM Watson healthcare.

I learned about some of the interesting work being done today with the Watson technology. For example, analysis of mental health states through natural language assessment. Watson can provide personality insights and tone analysis (say, from your e-mails).

I’ve often wondered how accessible the Watson technology is for those of us in technology outside of IBM. Watson has APIs that are available and a cloud service to run all kinds of interesting applications. You can go to the developer web site and try out some of the APIs on natural language interpretation (for mood, for example). As a developer, Anita said you can sign up for free for 30 days (and apply for longer through an application process). The services catalog is interesting to play around with the demo applications.

As I walked the floor at HIMSS, it was clear IBM is making a big bet on data and analytics. The IBM booth highlighted some of the recent acquisitions they’ve made in the data and/or analytics space. Companies like Merge and Truven are prominently displayed under the IBM banner on the HIMSS exhibit floor. The Watson brand is being used even beyond the Watson technology to highlight the focus on data.

IBM is clearly making a big push to apply the Watson technology in healthcare. Other sophisticated technologies are giving the human masters of the most complicated game in the world a run for their money. It isn’t clear to me that Watson is the silver bullet to all our healthcare problems. It certainly appears to be another interesting tool that can enable new insights. Technologies like this made available in a marketplace for innovators to use will probably surprise us in the applications.