IBM reportedly shopping Watson Health just as healthcare gets hot
- BySaksham Daga | January 8, 2022
According to Axios reports, IBM could try to sell its Watson Health division for just $ 1 billion. The question is why IBM is escaping health care like a warm-up and at such a low price.
Last month, Oracle spent $ 28 billion to acquire digital health recording company Cerner. Last spring, Microsoft spent nearly $ 20 billion buying nuances that are frequently used in the medical industry and have 10,000 healthcare customers. This is a high cost, suggesting that companies are enthusiastic about the healthcare industry and willing to spend a lot of money on it.
IBM launched Watson Health in April 2015 with a lot of noise. It should be used for health problems using Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence platform. The discussion now looks like this. Even the best doctors can’t read all the literature, but computers can do it quickly and provide action recommendations to increase the doctor’s knowledge and get better results.

Did what IBM did when it focused on something. In September of the same year, the company opened a chic headquarters in Cambridge. It also started with the announcement of the partnership. I checked all the checkboxes and worked with CVS, Apple, Johnson & Johnson.
Then it started buying business. The first acquisition was the medical data company Phytel and Explorys. It was part of the pattern. Next, $ 1 billion was paid to Merge Healthcare, a company that provides medical imaging data. Then you’ll buy the most expensive purchase, Truven Health Analytics, for $ 2.6 billion. He reportedly spent a total of $ 4 billion. This looks a bit modest compared to what Oracle and Microsoft just spent, but it was a huge amount in 2015 and 2016 when we upgraded.
All of these revolved around a data-centric approach to providing data to Watson Health’s machine learning models. It didn’t work as planned for some reason, but it was a big part of former CEO Ginni Rometty’s plan to modernize the company and focus on areas such as cloud and AI.