Internal IBM documents: Watson for Oncology gave "unsafe and incorrect" cancer treatment recommendations while IBM sold it to hospitals

IBM's Watson for Oncology produced erroneous cancer treatment advice, and its own medical specialists and customers logged "multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations," according to internal documents obtained by STAT. IBM was promoting the product to hospitals and physicians around the world at the time.

The slide decks, presented in June and July 2017 by Watson Health's deputy chief health officer and shared widely with division management, blame the failures on training. Engineers and doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center drilled the software on a small number of "synthetic" hypothetical cancer cases rather than real patient data, and based recommendations on the expertise of a few specialists per cancer type instead of "guidelines or evidence." Customers called the output "often inaccurate" and said it raised "serious questions about the process for building content and the underlying technology."