Last April, IBM (NYSE: IBM) rocked the Big Data world with the announcement that its supercomputer, called Watson, would be the center of its new Watson Health unit. At the same time, it announced the acquisitions of Phytel, a population health platform, and Explorys, a cloud-based healthcare intelligence company, to launch the effort. Last week, Watson got some “eyes,” as IBM announced its third and largest transaction (prices were not disclosed for the previous two). It plans to acquire medical imaging management firm Merge Healthcare Inc. (NASDAQ: MRGE) for $7.13 per share in cash, for a total transaction value of $1 billion. Merge’s technology platforms are used at more than 7,500 U.S. healthcare sites, as well as clinical research organizations and pharmaceutical companies to manage the growing body of medical images. With the Watson Health Cloud, IBM hopes to find new insights from a consolidated, patient-centric view of current and historical images, electronic health records, data from wearable devices and other related medical data. All in a HIPAA-compliant way, of course.
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