IBM Watson Health announced plans to acquire Truven Health Analytics, a provider of cloud-based healthcare data, analytics, and insights, for $2.6 billion.
Truven will bring to the IBM Watson Health portfolio more than 8,500 clients, including U.S. federal and state government agencies, employers, health plans, hospitals, clinicians, and life sciences companies.
Upon completion of the acquisition, IBM's health cloud will house health data from approximately 300 million patient lives, acquired from three companies. IBM plans to integrate Truven's cloud-based dataset spanning hundreds of different types of cost, claims, quality, and outcomes information with its existing datasets.
Through the Watson Health Cloud, healthcare organizations will be able to take previously disparate datasets, including vast amounts of unstructured data, and combine them together to create insights that help inform a broad range of health decisions.
Truven Health Analytics represents IBM's fourth major health data-related acquisition since launching the Watson Health unit in April 2015. Upon close of the transaction, IBM will have invested more than $4 billion to acquire and build an array of cognitive healthcare capabilities intended to help professionals improve health outcomes, control costs, and advance value-based care solutions.
The deal is projected to close later this year, subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions and applicable regulatory reviews.
