IBM to buy Merge Healthcare in US$1bil deal

Big push: IBM is aggressively expanding in the potentially lucrative healthcare IT sector. Photo: Reuters

IBM Corp said it would buy medical image company Merge Healthcare Inc in a US$1bil (RM3.90bil) deal and combine it with its newly formed health analytics unit, which is powered by its famous Watson supercomputer. 

IBM plans to combine data and images from Merge Healthcare's medical imaging management platform with Watson's cloud-based healthcare computing system.