Internal documents from IBM Watson Health showed negative assessments from customers such as Florida's Jupiter Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering criticizing its Watson for Oncology product for allegedly unsafe and incorrect cancer treatment recommendations.
Curated from incidentdatabase.ai · 25 July 2018 →
Watson for Oncology was sold to hospitals worldwide as a system that read the literature and recommended cancer treatment. Internal IBM material obtained by STAT in 2018 recorded customers and IBM's own medical staff finding unsafe and incorrect recommendations, including chemotherapy plus a drug carrying a warning against use in patients with severe bleeding, for a patient with severe bleeding. The documents attribute the problem to how it was trained: on a small number of hypothetical cases and the preferences of a handful of specialists rather than on real patient records and published guidelines. No patient harm was attributed to it. IBM wound the business down and sold Watson Health's assets in 2022. It is the clearest case on this page of a demonstration standing in for an evaluation for several years.
