The Rise and Fall of Explorys and IBM Watson Health

IBM Watson Health is a massive case study in healthcare innovation gone awry. IBM was one of the oldest and largest technology companies in the world and was riding a tailwind with IBM Watson’s Artificial Intelligence success on Jeopardy in 2011. The Watson Health division was seeded with multiple healthcare acquisitions, one of them being Explorys. Explorys had a portfolio of hosted population analytic solutions and the largest clinical dataset in the United States at the time, at approximately 50 million de-duplicated patients. The newly created division was loaded with potential and seemed destined for success. Yet Watson Health went from being founded in April 2015 to imploding in May 2018 in a little over three years and took Explorys down with it.