IBM blues

Once, Doug Meil, MS ’98, was a key part of the hottest startup in Greater Cleveland. He was a co-founder and the lead software engineer for Explorys, a healthcare analytics firm spun out of Cleveland Clinic in 2009.

Explorys had developed a search engine for medical records, a huge innovation in a data-rich field. It allowed doctors to search anonymous patient records to spy trends, devise treatments, and enhance care. The young company signed up dozens of hospital systems as it amassed the largest medical data set on Earth.

In 2015, IBM swooped in and bought Explorys, eyeing it as a cornerstone of its new IBM Watson Health division, which would use big data to cure disease. As Meil writes, “It seemed like a sure thing. What could go wrong?”

A lot, it turns out. By 2018, the partnership had “imploded” and both Explorys and Watson Health became synonymous with failure.

In The Rise and Fall of Explorys and IBM Watson Health: A Personal Memoir of a Healthcare Moonshot that Misfired, Meil offers an inside look at the dysfunction. He said the Explorys story offers lessons for anyone interested in managing innovation and a merger. That includes the importance of maintaining a startup edge—and serving the customer.

“You have to keep going, keep delivering, keep introducing new features,” he said in an interview with Case Alumnus. “That relentlessness is a make-or-break trait for a small business. I think there were too many people at IBM who thought customers would wait because they were IBM.”

The transition to IBM systems and expectations became all consuming, Meil said, and frustrated customers left.

Meil is well known in the tech community of Greater Cleveland. He started and for years ran the Cleveland Big Data Meetup, which convened data scientists and tech specialists at upbeat networking events. He’s also a regular contributor to the blog of the Association for Computing Machinery. It was a 2021 post about the IBM Explorys debacle that inspired the book.

“After that, people just kept asking me, ‘When’s the book coming out?’” Meil said. Published in September by Routledge, it is available through all online booksellers.