Monthly Archives: April 2019

UT Audit of MD Anderson / IBM Collaboration

The details can be downloaded here.

A few snippets…

“Gift funds used in support of the OEA project have a deficit balance of $11.59 million as of August 31, 2016, meaning that MD Anderson spent gift monies it has not yet received from donors.”

“Agreement with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for “Business Plan for a Flagship Informatics Tool” to lead an assessment of the “capabilities necessary to build the tool” and “incorporate the outcome of the assessment into a business plan that will guide the development” of the tool.”

“The first MD Anderson contract related to development of OEA using Watson technology was signed with IBM in June 2012… The original contract terms were for six months at a fixed fee of $2.4 million. That contract has been extended 12 times, with total fees of $39.2 million. The current extension expired on October 31, 2016.”

Interestingly, if you search in the document for “radiology” or “imaging”:

 

That said, it is a good cautionary tale for the radiologist-informaticist because the value proposition very closely mirrored what we are hearing in imaging today.

Just swap out the words “treatment,” “clinical-trial,” and “therapy” with “diagnosis” and “imaging”: