After announcing plans to acquire open source software provider Red Hat this week, IBM now plans to move its Watson Health cognitive services to a hybrid cloud model.Watson, the IBM supercomputer that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze natural language and perform data analytics, has been used to identify medical data sources, generate hypotheses, recommend patient treatments to physicians or match patients to clinical trials.[ Further reading: A.I.

and speech advances bring virtual assistants to work ]The Veterans Administration has also used Watson for genomics as part of its precision oncology program, which primarily looks for possible new treatments for stage 4 cancer patients who have exhausted other options.