Signify Premium Insight: The Options for Watson

In 2015 IBM launched Watson Health. In its initial years, several companies were acquired and placed under Big Blue’s new banner. These included Phytel, a Dallas-based provider of integrated population health management software and Explorsys, which specialises in EHR data management and analytics, both of which were acquired in April 2015. Later that year, the tech giant bought imaging IT vendor Merge Healthcare for $1bn and finally, in the following April, the company closed on the $2.6bn acquisition of Truven Health Analytics, a provider of cloud-based healthcare data and analytics.

IBM planned to take advantage of the technical capabilities of these companies, as well as their datasets and customer bases, combining them with its own expertise in natural-language AI and cognitive computing. At launch, IBM promised the new division would be able to connect and combine datasets such as provider electronic medical records, clinical research, claims data and individual genomes, alongside data gleaned from imaging procedures.