Mergers & Acquisitions

Marking a "new chapter as a company," Nokia Technologies announced Tuesday that it plans to acquire French connected health device maker Withings for $191 million. Withings' smartphone-connected scales, blood pressure cuffs, activity trackers and, recently, thermometers can enable remote patient monitoring and population health management programs. Nokia has been searching for a new focus area since it sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft. In March, Nokia Technology President Ramzi Haidamus suggested that future could lie with healthcare.  "We’re also looking at another area where we have not launched any products – digital health," he told Fortune last month. "Digital health is something that comes very natural to Nokia... A lot of research is happening right now in the field of digital health." With the Withings announcement, Haidamus has continued to speak of digital health as a major new direction for Nokia. "We’re now starting a new chapter as a company, this one focused on connecting you to better health through technology," he wrote in a statement. "We aim to help you lead a happier, healthier life through the kind of beautifully designed products that you expect from Nokia," he added. "To help us do this as fast as possible, we will be welcoming Withings into the Nokia family. A leader in digital health products and apps designed to improve everyday well-being and long term health, Withings will combine perfectly with Nokia’s heritage of mobility and connectivity." Withings CEO Cedric Hutchings also shared his thoughts in a blog post. "We started Withings in 2008 to explore the possibilities provided by the Internet of Things,” he wrote. "Today we can proudly say we are leading the connected health revolution, inventing smart, beautiful things to give people the knowledge they need to live happier, healthier lives. When we were approached by Nokia, it was inspiring to discover how perfectly aligned our visions are. Together, we believe we can truly transform the world." Hutchings also assured Withings users that the acquisition won’t lead to any change in the experience of using Withings products or apps.  "We’ve been impressed with the plans the Nokia team has shared with us both for Preventive Health and Patient Care," he wrote. "As soon as we close the deal, we can start working together to determine our way forward as one team with a broad but focused portfolio of incredible products and innovations." A version of this story was originally posted by Healthcare IT News' sister site, MobiHealthNews.

CloudMedx, a big data health analytics company, has acquired Gyrus Labs to extend its CloudMedx Analytics Platform, which is designed to help improve patient care through data insights.

The first quarter of this year saw a 27 percent spike in health IT venture capital and the most M&A activity in a single quarter, according to a report from Mercom Capital Group.

Rather than streamlining operations such as clinical and IT that could create significant savings, many merged organizations continue running acquired hospitals as individual entities, the consultancy found. 

e-MDs, an Austin, Texas-based developer of ambulatory electronic health records and practice management tools, will acquire several technology assets from McKesson Business Performance Services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The technologies include McKesson Practice Choice, Medisoft, Medisoft Clinical, Lytec, Lytec MD and Practice Partner. e-MDs officials say the tools will be used by some 55,000 of its provider customers nationwide. The company hopes the acquisition will benefit small- to medium-sized practices and broaden e-MDs' presence in the ambulatory IT market. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "The McKesson team supporting these products is passionate about the same thing we are- helping doctors maintain focus on the patient,” said e-MDs CEO Derek Pickell in a statement. "All of us at e-MDs look forward to aligning this team with ours to bring e-MDs’ full suite of solutions to thousands of new providers across the country." "e-MDs is the perfect fit for these assets because it has award-winning technology ideally suited to this customer base,” said Scott Sanner, general manager of McKesson Business Performance Services, in a statement. Twitter: @JessiefDavis

Experian Health is the new brand for what were 11 businesses that serve the healthcare field, the company announced at HIMSS16.

UPMC says it will take a majority interest in New York-based medCPU, become a customer of the company and also will co-develop new products to take to market. UPMC Enterprises, the commercialization arm of UPMC, has offered to purchase stock from existing non-employee medCPU shareholders, and executives expects UPMC will hold majority ownership in the privately held company when the offer is completed. [Also: Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC wins Davies Award] Also, planned for the second quarter of this year, UPMC will lead an investment round of $35 million in new capital to accelerate expansion of medCPU. Existing medCPU shareholder Merck Global Health Innovation Fund is also participating in this round. “Our partnership with medCPU will provide UPMC with technology and solutions that will be immediately valuable to our clinicians and patients,” said Tal Heppenstall, president of UPMC Enterprises. Longer term, he added, the technology would enable the development of other data-dependent applications in areas such as care management, population health and consumer engagement. The customer and co-developer model is one that UPMC has also employed with data analytics company Health Catalyst. MedCPU counts more than 60 hospital facilities among its clients. It will open a Pittsburgh office, hire more than 20 engineers and other staff to work with UPMC to co-develop additional products and to improve existing solutions. MedCPU’s technology addresses the healthcare IT challenges of interoperability, capturing all relevant patient data, and understanding free text, dictation and structured data from EHRs and ancillary systems, MedCPU CEO and co-founder and former helicopter pilot Eyal Ephrat, MD, said. Twitter: @HealthITNews

McKesson is expanding its footprint in the oncology field with a combined $1.2 billion acquisition of two companies – Vantage Oncology and Biologics.

Medsphere Systems, maker of the OpenVista electronic health record, and MBS/Net have merged, adding physician practice services and proprietary applications to Medsphere’s existing healthcare IT tools and services for acute and inpatient behavioral health settings.  Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but officials said MBS/Net will retain its name and operate as a division of Medsphere.  Medsphere’s OpenVista EHR is derived from the VistA system developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service. [Also: Health Partners New England taps Medsphere for behavioral health] The addition of Cleveland-based MBS/Net expands Medsphere’s products and services to include an ambulatory physician suite of products that includes a physician practice management system, ambulatory EHR, document management system and a scheduling app. It also includes the company’s outsourced revenue cycle management and practice hardware management services, officials say. The Medsphere-MBS/Net merger follows the March 2015 merger of Medsphere and Phoenix Health Systems, which provides a range of healthcare IT services, including systems implementation, compliance project management and more. MBS/Net’s products and services coupled with Medsphere’s OpenVista platform will further interoperability between Medsphere’s hospital clients and their affiliated physician communities, Medsphere President and CEO Irv Lichtenwald said in a statement. "We’ve seen the benefits the practice management and revenue cycle solutions have created for MBS/Net clients, in some instances boosting individual practice revenue by more than 100 percent," he said. "The focus of MBS/Net solutions on physician practices and the recent addition of Phoenix Health Systems’ consulting and services enables Medsphere to meet the needs of providers across the spectrum of healthcare." Twitter: @HealthITNews

IBM executives say the purchase adds not only a massive repository of health data to the Watson Health Cloud, but also an extensive client roster to IBM's Watson Health unit.