[arohner]

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.

[btilly]

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.