Siemens Healthcare (NYSE:SI) has agreed to acquire MobileMD, a Yardley, Pennsylvania health IT company that provides a cloud-based platform between physician practices and hospitals that translates and normalizes data from different health IT systems.
It is Siemens Healthcare’s first health IT acquisition, a spokesman for the company said.
MobileMD’s system allows physician practices to maintain their own ambulatory health IT solution and exchange patient data for things such as laboratory results, imaging results and discharge notes. It is used by 110 hospitals and more than 2,000 physician practices, including Main Line Health.
The acquisition will give MobileMD access to Siemens’ vast network in the U.S. The employees of the five-year-old company, led by Todd Fisher, will join Siemens Health Services Business Unit, but MobileMD will retain its Yardley offices for the moment.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
John Glaser, CEO of the health services business unit for Siemens Healthcare, said it was impressed with MobileMD’s capabilities to enable data sharing and its level of customer satisfaction.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Fisher said: “We see a paradigm shift whereby care is increasingly coordinated and delivered throughout the entire community at myriad locations and care settings. Patients are treated along a continuum, not at discrete locations. For patients, each event, each encounter with a provider impacts past and future care delivery. Improving clinical data access and information flow are therefore critical. …”
Health IT has boomed in recent years as an attractive investment as more healthcare system and physician practices shift to cloud computing and focus on managing their EMR systems.
