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 Today in Health it, this story is the sale of Watson Health and what we can learn from the journey this far. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this weekend Health IT at channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. I. And engaged VMware was one of our first sponsors at this week in Health it, and now they're one of our first sponsors at today in Health it.

They have been committed to our mission of providing relevant content to health IT professionals since the start. They recently completed an executive study with MIT on the top, healthcare Trends, shaping it, resilience, covering how the pandemic drove unique transformation in healthcare. This is just one of the many resources they have for healthcare professionals for this and several others.

Then specific use cases began to emerge. Big Blue had big plans for what it might accomplish. And then it had some growth challenges. Since then, Watson Business has grown substantially through a series of targeted multi-billion dollar acquisitions emerge Healthcare for Imaging Tel and Explorers for population health and Truven Health for analytics, for value-based care, I.

Ricochet around the healthcare industry about the big picture promise and pitfalls of AI in healthcare. At the same time, IBM has made it a priority to showcase the many ways AI and machine learning are bringing benefits to care delivery. There have continued to be new innovations and they talk about some of those things in other news.

However, IBM Watson's longtime Chief Health Officer, Dr. Cayo re left the company after 10 years this past month to join CVS Health. Okay. And there's some options on the table of how they're gonna sell it. They have roughly a billion in revenue in the subsidiary. So that's uh, I guess the starting point for conversations.

There are mulling options, a sales or private equity firm, an industry player. I. Or a merger with a blank check company. Wow, I'd like to meet a blank check company. That's an interesting concept. While the sale is not a given, any potential valuation would also be an open question. IBM has recently made it clear that it would like to streamline and refocus its energy on hybrid cloud.

Alright, so what's the so what on this? There's. There's a lot here. We've all heard the stories. IBM made sure we heard the stories. They came in loud and proud into healthcare. In my mind, no company has squandered as much of a lead as IBM has over the years. I think it is a cultural problem, but I have no insider view on this.

Let's talk Watson for a minute. Watson's downfall was hubris, ego, and a complete misunderstanding. Of healthcare and healthcare data. It wasn't the first company to make these mistakes and it will not be the last for sure. We won Jeopardy. Now we're ready to go through your data and make a diagnosis on your health.

People lost their jobs buying IBM for the first time. I know it's, I. Easy to take pot shots at IBM after the fact, but this was preventable, which is why I'm talking about it now. I'm talking about it so that if you're listening to this and you're one of the next companies to come into this space, you might learn from it.

And really the process is pretty simple. Step in first, find a partner, get some data, figure out what . Claims you can make and what claims you shouldn't make. Figure out the culture you're stepping into. Be humble until you have something and then you can shout it from the rooftops. Healthcare is underwhelmed with big claim companies that haven't done anything yet.

They're all from Missouri. All of healthcare is from Missouri. The show me state, show me where you've done it before. Nice. Okay. That's great. Now show me where you've done it at scale. You get the picture. Stop telling me and show me. IBM's hub has created adversaries where they should have had partners and fans.

Would I buy Watson? Sure. You know, clearly Watson is greater than just healthcare and the technology sound. I think it's amazing and has many applications in healthcare. If I were evaluating the healthcare revenue from Watson, I would point out that the problem was in the data. They never understood the healthcare data, how it is collected, stored, and used the wide variability in the data.

They struggled to get the data they needed to train Watson. They made purchases to make it a reality. But even then, . It was messy data. And by the way, that's a great business to be in. If you could figure out a way to get all of healthcare's data into a form that it can feed machine learning and ai, that would be a good business to be in.

I assume they're gonna be focusing in on their Red Hat acquisition, and they're going to start to do . Development. But again, there's a lot of players like VMware who's also, uh, in that space and made acquisitions in that space. So I would say ask, what is your differentiator? What is your competitive advantage in this space?

IBM, you have smart minds, a bajillion patents, and you have made tons of acquisitions, which even broadens your value further, find the differentiator. . Because being IBM being big, blue doesn't really cut it anymore. You have to show value. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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Thanks for listening. That's all for now.