IBM has closed its acquisition of Phytel

IBM announced this week it has closed the acquisition of Phytel, which provides cloud-based software that helps healthcare providers and care teams coordinate activities across medical facilities by automating certain aspects of patient care.

The company originally announced the acquisition back in April, when it also bought Explorys, a provider of cognitive cloud-based analytics that provides insights for care facilities derived from datasets derived from numerous and diverse financial, operational and medical record systems.

“The acquisition of Phytel supports our goal to advance the quality and effectiveness of personal healthcare by enabling secure access to individualised insights and a more complete picture of the many factors that can affect people’s health,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson.

At the time IBM said the acquisitions would bolster IBM’s efforts to sell advanced analytics and cognitive computing to primary care providers, large hospital systems and physician networks.

To that end the company also created a special healthcare unit within its Watson business unit to develop solution specifically for the sector and based on the company’s cognitive compute platform.

Just last week the company redoubled its efforts to target health services, this time through social health and mobile platforms. It announced a deal with Japan Post and Apple that will see Japan Post deploy custom iOS apps built by IBM Global Business Services, which will provide services like medication reminders, exercise and diet tracking, community activity scheduling and grocery shopping as part of the post group’s Watch Over service for the elderly.