Bob Wachter

They were at the cutting edge.

They really weren't thinking about practicality.

That was an important lesson for today.

You don't start on the hardest problem and one with the highest stakes and one if you get it wrong, you can kill somebody.

You start on low-hanging fruit.

You need to get buy-in and get trust from everybody, patients and doctors and nurses.

I think we're not making that mistake this time, but that flamed out.

Then IBM Watson beat the Jeopardy champions in 2011.

You may remember that moment when Watson, a supercomputer trained to play Jeopardy, competed against a pair of human Jeopardy champions, including Ken Jennings.

Watson won $77,000 in that competition.

That was a nice payday, but of course Watson cost billions to develop and IBM had much higher ambitions for it than winning at Jeopardy.

I remember watching that and thinking, well, we're all toast.

And when Watson then tried its hand in healthcare, which was the first industry that it tried to work on, it completely flamed out.

IBM did enter Watson into some high-end partnerships with MD Anderson Cancer Research Center, for instance.

But Watson just didn't turn out to be very useful.

Some of its answers were obvious, others dubious.

And it was very expensive.

In the end, IBM dismantled Watson, keeping some parts and selling off the rest.

Again, not ready for prime time.

And then the sort of big deal in medicine was about 15 years ago, we all went from paper records to these huge software systems called electronic health records.