I have blogged periodically about IBM's Watson which has never lived up to its early expectations (see: Scandal at M.D. Anderson -- Operating Loss and Then Watson Deep-Sixed). Forbes recently published a piece about Watson with an analysis of this failure (see: IBM Watson And The Value Of Open) and below is an excerpt from it:
...[W]ith the passage of more time, it must be said that IBM Watson has not delivered the results that IBM expected. One particular moment was the decision of MD Anderson’s Cancer Center to withdraw from its partnership with IBM in 2017. An internal audit by the University of Texas found that the university had spent over $62 million dollars (not counting internal staff time) and did not meet its goals....While many factors were no doubt at work here, the shift in IBM’s focus from cognitive computing to cloud computing is certainly a part of this change....
There are technical reasons [that IBM has not succeeded with Watson including]...the rapid and unexpected progress of other forms of AI, such as deep learning. But another likely reason has to do with how IBM took its then-leading technology to market. IBM commercialized Watson in health care with a vertically integrated strategy. All of the activities from the laboratory to the customer were delivered by IBM itself. There were no third party system integrators. There were no APIs for others to use to link to and build upon Watson. There was no software development kit, or open source reference designs to help people explore Watson’s abilities, and figure out whether and how they might solve other problems. Even customers were only able to access a black box, putting queries in and receiving the result, with no way to comprehend how the result was developed. Being vertically integrated gave IBM complete end-to-end control over Watson. But it condemned Watson to being applied in only a few areas.
This story calls to mind my recent note about how Cerner was turning to AWS to solve its EHR functionality problems (see: Cerner Offers AI Tool to Combat Physician EHR Burnout; Cerner Leveraging Amazon's Cloud Storage and AI for Increased EHR Functionality; EHR Vendor Cerner Turns to Amazon Web Services for AI Development). Epic will undoubtedly pursue the same course of action in the future or face serious consequences. Here is the logic that I think is operating in both cases:
- EHRs like Cerner and Epic are EHR giants with systems designed primarily to promote efficient billing. Inefficiencies in these systems are leading to physician and nurse burnout (see: Study Shows Physician Burnout Directly Related to EHRs). These highly trained professionals are being turned into clericals forced to use poorly designed systems.
- There is only one solution open to these companies to revamp their products -- AI. The inefficient antiquated software and inefficient design will be pushed out of sight and users will interact mainly with the AI-driven features.
- I suspect that neither Cerner nor Epic have the employee talent to develop these AI add-ons despite their large size and profits in this burgeoning field. They are thus turning to third-parties experts like AWS to develop new AI solutions.
- Users in hospitals will soon develop greater expertise in using the AI-enhanced products than the EHR employees because they will be interacting with them on a constant basis. They will then choose to interact more with the third-party developers than Epic and Cerner employees because that's where the correct answers will lie.
- Similar to the IBM/Watson failure, Cerner and Epic are entering a cul-de-sac and will slowly loose control and support for their base products. The third-party AI companies will come to understand this and soon bring to market their own EHRs that will be modern and comprehensive. Ah, the perils of too much emphasis on vertical integration.
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