ANN ARBOR – The Watson Health business unit of IBM announced this week plans to acquire Truven Health Analytics, a provider of healthcare data analysis. The purchase price would be $2.6 billion. There was no immediate word on the future of Truven’s Ann Arbor headquarters staff.
Truven will bring more than 8,500 clients, including U.S. federal and state government agencies, employers, health plans, hospitals, clinicians and life sciences companies to the IBM Watson Health portfolio.
Upon completion of the acquisition, IBM’s health cloud will house one of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of health-related data, representing an aggregate of approximately 300 million patient lives acquired from three companies. IBM plans to integrate Truven’s extensive cloud-based data set spanning hundreds of different types of cost, claims, quality and outcomes information with its existing data sets.
Through the Watson Health Cloud, healthcare organizations will be able to take previously disparate data sets, including vast amounts of unstructured data, and combine them together to create unique 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. The others were Phytel, a Dallas, Texas-based population health management services provider; Explorys, a Cleveland-based healthcare data analytics firm; and Merge Healthcare, a Chicago medical imaging provider.
“The Truven Health Analytics team is eager to combine our capabilities and expertise with the Watson Health portfolio,” said Mike Boswood, President and CEO, Truven Health Analytics. “This will help catapult the industry forward to transform healthcare and to save and improve lives.”
The deal is projected to close later this year, subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions and applicable regulatory reviews.
IBM Watson Health clients include Apple, Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson, Novo Nordisk, and CVS Health.
