IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Merge Healthcare Incorporated, a leading provider of medical image handling and processing, interoperability and clinical systems. Under terms of the $1 billion transaction, Merge shareholders will receive $7.13 per share in cash.
Merge's technology platforms are used at more than 7,500 U.S. healthcare sites, as well as many of the world's leading clinical research institutes and pharmaceutical firms to manage a growing body of medical images. It is anticipated that these organizations will look to use the Watson Health Cloud to surface new insights from a consolidated, patient-centric view of current and historical images, electronic health records, consumer contributed data from wearable devices and other related medical data, in a HIPAA-enabled cloud environment. These insights can help clinicians to efficiently identify options for the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of a broad array of health conditions such as cancer, stroke and heart disease.
Merge will become part of IBM's new Watson Health business unit, bolstering IBM clients' ability to analyze and cross-reference medical images against 315 billion data points already in the Watson Health Cloud, including lab results, electronic health records, genomic tests, clinical studies and other health-related data sources. Merge's clients could compare new medical images with a patient's medical history as well as populations of similar patients to detect changes and anomalies. Insights generated by Watson could then help healthcare providers and researchers to pursue more personalized approaches to diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of patients.
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