IBM gets 215M patient profiles with $2.6B Truven Health buy

IBM's Watson Health, the company's 10-month-old healthcare data crunching unit, plans to acquire Truven Health Analytics and its 215 million patient profiles, with the ultimate goal of helping health-care providers make better business and patient-care decisions.

The $2.6 billion deal, announced Thursday, gives IBM Watson Health access to a huge new data set in the unit's efforts to mine data to improve health-care quality while controlling costs.

Including data from Truven, Watson Health will have access to about 300 million patient data sets, IBM said. Using IBM's Watson Health Cloud, health-care organizations will be able to combine several data sets.

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