The Rise and Fall of Explorys and IBM Watson Health: A Personal Memoir of a Healthcare Moonshot that Misfired...

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Doug Meil

The Rise and Fall of Explorys and IBM Watson Health

A Personal Memoir of a Healthcare Moonshot that Misfired

Doug Meil

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Productivity Press
22 September 2025

Management: leadership & motivation; Public ownership & nationalisation; Health systems & services

In 2015, Explorys was a healthcare intelligence cloud company that had built one of the largest clinical data sets in the world, representing more than 50 million lives. It provided secure cloud-based solutions for clinical integration, at-risk population management, cost-of-care measurement, and pay-for- performance. The acquisition of Explorys complemented and strengthened the IBM Watson Health Cloud platform and empowered IBM’s vast ecosystem of clients, partners, and medical researchers to surface new connections among diverse and previously siloed healthcare data sets. The combination of both Explorys and IBM Watson Health was expected to spur the creation of a new generation of data-driven applications and solutions designed to advance health and wellness. So, what went wrong?

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.

IBM Watson Health’s ascent and descent were covered by both healthcare and mainstream media. Watson Health was self-described as IBM’s ""Moonshot"" in healthcare. This venture failed, and it cost IBM billions of dollars. These were expensive lessons on managing innovation in healthcare, but also on managing innovation in general. This book chronicles the story of Explorys and IBM Watson Health and what led to its downfall in just three short years. Written by one of Explorys’ founding engineers, the book relates the rise and fall of both Explorys and IBM Watson and provides a message for future tech entrepreneurs and IT managers alike.

By: Doug Meil
Imprint: Productivity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781032793603
ISBN 10: 1032793600
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 22 September 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Chapter 1 - The Creation Of Explorys. Chapter 2 - The Actual Creation Of Explorys. Chapter 3 - Scaling a Startup. Chapter 4 – Moving A Startup. Chapter 5 – Acquisition Due Diligence. Chapter 6 - IBM Watson Health: Formation. Chapter 7 - IBM Watson Health: Stalling. Chapter 8 – IBM Distinguished. Chapter 9 - IBM Watson Health: Decline. Chapter 10 - In Spite Of Everything. Chapter 11 - Meanwhile….. Chapter 12 - The End of Watson Health.

Doug Meil is a software architect for data and analytic solutions. Doug created the Cleveland Big Data Meetup in 2010 and organized it for 14 years with 81 meetup events and over 4,000 members. Doug was also the founding engineer of Explorys, a healthcare informatics startup that was acquired by IBM to be a foundational part of the newly created Watson Health division. Doug has also written over 30 posts for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on software development and other technical topics and has also written for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Doug was an Apache HBase committer during the early days of Hadoop and is an ACM Senior Member.