IBM Watson Health just struck its fourth major deal in a move to add healthcare-spending analysis to its suite of products.
The company on Thursday announced the $2.6 billion acquisition of Truven Health Analytics, a company that collects data to find ways to treat patients more effectively while spending less, a concept often known as "value-based care."
The idea with value-based care is that instead of getting paid based on the number of people that come to a hospital, doctors have a financial incentive to do more to ultimately help the patient feel better faster. That way, healthcare providers are paid to keep people healthy and help improve the condition of people living with chronic conditions like diabetes in an evidence-based way.
To do that, Truven's been tracking everything from drug prices to hospital performance to employee compensation. Mike Boswood, the CEO of Truven told Business Insider that the plan is to combine IBM's strength in understanding clinical data with Truven's experience working with administrative and claims data to get a full picture of a particular patient.
Watson is a supercomputer that can process huge amounts of data to do everything from giving you recipes to make dinner to helping out your fantasy baseball team.
In healthcare, it's already working to help doctors treat diabetes, fight cancer and monitor pregnancy by analyzing medical studies and other research data. As part of the acquisition, Truven will be expanding the existing network of clients and partners that Watson Health is already working with to include everything from government agencies to top pharmaceutical and life science companies all with the intent of making the information each group collects much more accessible.
"Core to the Watson Health strategy is democratizing the data," Deborah DiSanzo, the general manager of Watson Health told Business Insider. "Putting it in a health cloud that our ecosystem of partners can go in and build applications on as well."
