By Donna Goodison, Boston Herald
IBM is buying Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion, its fourth acquisition in less than a year to beef up the capabilities of its Cambridge-headquartered IBM Watson Health.
The purchase of the Ann Arbor, Mich., company will boost Watson Health’s cloud-based health data by about 215 million patients and add 8,500-plus customers that use Truven to dissect health industry-generated data.
“Truven has been around for a long time and has built up a large mass of industry-specific, knowledgeable practiced talent,” said Cory Wiegert, a Watson Health vice president. “That goes a long way in not only defining products, but knowing how the industry works and shaping what the future of the industry will bring.”
When the deal closes, Watson Health will have health-related data from about 300 million people.
“By applying cognitive and analytic toolsets to that diversity of correlated data sets, you’re able to obtain insights and find things that, by manually running reports across disparate data sets, you would never be able to see,” Wiegert said. “... You’re able to ... perhaps change outcomes and care pathways that become a transformational mechanism in the health care industry.”
Watson is IBM’s technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data.
After the Truven deal closes, IBM will have invested more than $4 billion to buy and build its health care capabilities to help improve health outcomes, control costs and advance value-based health care.
©2016 the Boston Herald Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
