Merative: New Name for IBM’s Watson Health Data Resources

One of the more famous, recent crash-and-burn episodes in high technology, IBM Watson Health, is now rebranded as Merative. Francisco Partners, a private-equity company, had purchased most of the Watson Health assets in January, and is now joined with two other private-equity firms, True Wind Capital and Sixth Street, in launching the new company, based on Ann Arbor, MI.

Merative is organized into six business units: Healthcare analytics; Clinical decision support; Clinical development; Social program management; Real-world evidence; and Enterprise imaging. Global clients will exist among employers, governments, providers, health plans and life sciences companies. 

Already, the top 20 pharma companies are clients, says the firm. Specific services for life sciences include enhance clinical trial efficiency and reducing trial costs; reinforcing clinical research by providing access to over 8,500 journals and 750,000 publications; and meeting post-market requirements, by generating real-world evidence to demonstrate the clinical and commercial value of therapies, to FDA and payers.

Left mostly unsaid in all this is the “Watson” part of what had been Watson Health—IBM’s famed AI tools for natural language processing and analytics. IBM had spent billions to mate that home-grown technology with a series of acquisitions of healthcare data repositories a decade ago. Unmet expectations of a new era in healthcare data analytics led to the company abandoning its efforts late last year.