Health and Wellness Informatics News
IBM announced to sell Watson Health assets to a private equity firm named Francisco Partners. It is the next step toward a platform-based hybrid cloud and AI strategy.
The tech company IBM will sell healthcare data and analytics assets. The Watson Health business will provide the means. Bloomberg calls out the price of the deal as more than $1 billion. The second quarter will also record the closing of the deal.
The deal opens extensive and diverse datasets for Francisco Partners. It will also avail the technology products of IBM. Over the years, the company acquired health insights, MarketScan, and others. Francisco Partners will also benefit from all the clinical development.
A standalone company will originate from the deal. However, it will serve the existing provider imaging life sciences. It includes various digital health sectors like Availity, Trellis, Capsule, and others. GoodRX and Zocdoc are also part of the current and past investment of the firm.
There is a total of $30 billion investment in assets and other tech companies. Francisco aimed to partner to carve out the divisional healthcare data transfer.
Justin Chen, Principal at Francisco Partners, states,” We look forward to supporting the talented employees and management team, helping the standalone company focus on growth opportunities to realize its full potential, and delivering enhanced value to customers and partners.”
The deal comes as no surprise. The discussion was all over last year. Similarly, the Oracle-Cerner merger was also in the picture. But, IBM found a winning bidder in January. It claimed the price to dig deeper into the roots of healthcare data.
Watson had hype in the AI-enabled clinical decision support. IBM is also spending billions on building out the Watson Health portfolio. Merge Healthcare, Phytel, Truven Health Analytics are part of the same.
The primary goal was the application of IBM’s AI. It was to derive the insights. Unfortunately, it never came into the picture. IBM made a big decision to sell its data assets. It directs the failure of the inapplication of the tools. The application of advanced analytics to data was missing.
IBM will stay with Watson. Francisco will also make use of the data and analytics to enhance healthcare data transfer.
