IBM's Watson, the natural-language processing computer perhaps most famous in popular culture for obliterating its opponents on a January 2011 evening of Jeopardy!, has more recently been making news in the healthcare industry. A growing number of care providers are buying or renting Watson's computing power to assist their medical professionals and staff with decision-making. The possibilities for using big data to improve outcomes for patients are myriad and exciting.

With these new tools come new responsibilities. As contextual computing devices become more widely available and, presumably, less expensive and more conveniently sized, how will health providers' standard of care change in response? How can the healthcare industry use this technology to improve care and save lives, but also manage the potential exposure to liability that comes with reliance on massive amounts of data from myriad sources that no single human brain could ever contextualize or verify? Many important questions spring from this change - questions revolving around patient privacy, managing inputs, ethics in research, data protection and the potential for breach, and how to use the cold numbers of statistics to assess and improve the unquantifiable goal of "better quality of life." For health systems' risk management and in-house counsel, innovation also brings concerns for management of potential liability. The availability and use of big data analytics injects uncertainty into some already slippery concepts, including the "duty of care."

Originally published in Birmingham Medical News - February 11, 2015.