Don't let IBM's blunders in health care blind you to the huge benefits of technology in medicine

IBM Watson might not deliver on its lofty goal to revolutionize medicine with artificial intelligence, as a recent investigation suggests. But that doesn't mean new technology will be incapable of improving health care. IBM put a heavy dose of investment and hype into the medical potential of its machine learning system Watson. It was supposed to help doctors make decisions on how to identify and treat diseases, most specifically cancer. STAT News reported this week that Watson has failed to gain much adoption in hospitals and has proven ineffective at recognizing various cancers.