IBM announced its intent to buy Truven Health Analytics today for a whopping $2.6 billion. It is the fourth major purchase for Watson Health since the unit was established in 2014.
Watson Health was formed when IBM purchased Phytel and Explorys in April, 2014. Both companies had the common denominator of being data-driven health companies. The unit added Merge Healthcare for another billion dollars last August to give the company access to a huge store of imaging data.
While Truven gives IBM a treasure trove of data on hundreds of types of cost, claims, quality and outcomes information, it’s not just about the data for data’s sake, says Anil Jain, VP of Watson Health who came to the unit through the Explorys acquisition.
“We’re getting the data and all the resources to make sense of it and help us scale and [provide] data driven-insights and knowledge-driven insights,” Jain told TechCrunch.
He added that the data requires human experts to make sense of it and the 2500 employees coming over in the deal include data scientists, researchers and a host of other experts who will be added to Watson Health.
“Most of the data in health care is in disparate databases,” Deborah DiSanzo, general manager at IBM Watson Health, said in an interview. “The strategy of IBM is to bring this data together and democratize it so that both IBM and our ecosystem of partners can build health solutions on top of it.”
The success of Watson, which Rometty has called her moonshot, is integral to IBM’s future as the company struggles to reverse sales declines for the past 15 consecutive quarters. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company last year bought Merge Healthcare for $1 billion to gain medical-imaging data and technology. IBM also acquired health care big data analytics provider Explorys and population health technology seller Phytel.
The deal will double the size of IBM’s Watson Health business unit to 5,000 employees as the company adds new technology services to sell to doctors and hospitals.
“We’re now deeply embedded in the health-care system,” said John Kelly, IBM’s senior vice president of Solutions Portfolio and Research.
IBM has been on a health-care spending spree in the past year. It has doled out more than $4 billion to acquire medical-technology companies.
The company’s other health-care acquisitions include Phytel Inc. and Explorys Inc., companies that maintained clinical data on more than 50 million patients, and Merge Healthcare Inc., which specialized in medical-image technology
Much of Truven’s data relates to medical costs, which fills a hole in IBM’s emerging Watson Health product line, Mr. Kelly said.
He stopped short of saying that this would mark the end of IBM’s health-care buying spree, but said, “we have all of the major data sets that we need.”
“Think of the Watson Health Platform — the cloud, the core technology being available for solutions being built for our client base. In some cases, we will build those solutions, in other cases they will be built by our partners,” he said.
IBM partners include Apple, Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Novo Nordisk, and CVS Health
Be the first to comment on "IBM Buying Truven for $2.6 Billion to Amass More Health Data"