IBM’s Watson, the supercomputer that gave our best two Jeopardy-playing humans what-for in three nights of play two years ago, is now showing mortals how to do better at another classic human struggle: curing cancer. Watson has spent the last year parsing data on cancer treatments from the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Center and is now being offered as a cloud-based application for determining the best course of action for cancer patients.

While Watson’s turn at Jeopardy was entertaining and a true battle of man versus machine, the computer’s higher purpose was always in medicine. During a panel discussion of Watson held as the computer did battle with Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Dr. Chris Welty, a member of Watson’s algorithms team, noted that the computer had a future in helping diagnose medical conditions (as well as in tech support).

According to the Associated Press, Watson has improved its performance by 240 percent since its Jeopardy stint. In March 2012, scientists at Sloan-Kettering set Watson about the task of internalizing 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, 1.5 million patient records, 2 million pages of texts from medical journals, and 1,500 lung-cancer cases.

Watson can see connections and trends in the data that humans, or even humans and databases, may not be able to. Now that the data has been compiled, Watson is being offered as an app that can be accessed through a tablet or computer that will compare a cancer patient’s medical records with Watson’s index. The results Watson returns are recommendations on treatment, in descending order of confidence on effectiveness.

The algorithm can actually be run in two ways. Operating strictly on cancer, Watson stacks treatments in the order of likelihood that they’ll succeed. But the results can also be augmented by insurance coverage, in which case Watson considers which treatments will be authorized for payment.

The application is owned by WellPoint and is set to be adopted by medical groups at the Maine center for Cancer Medicine and WestMed in Westchester County, New York, according to the AP. WellPoint will sell the applications to other institutions at a price yet to be determined, and IBM will receive a cut.