	IBM’s announcement that it is acquiring Merge, includes the eClinical assets of the company. While IBM led that its Watson Health platform be enhanced with data and images obtained from Merge’s medical imaging management platform, enabling Watson to “see” in an effort to unlock the value of medical images to help physicians make better patient care decisions, its press release mentioned other capabilities that IBM will gain. IBM’s Watson Health unit plans to bring together Merge’s product and solution offerings with existing expertise in cognitive computing, population health, and cloud-based healthcare intelligence offerings to:

		Offer researchers insights to aid clinical trial design, monitoring and evaluation;

		Help clinicians to efficiently identify options for the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring a broad array of health conditions such as cancer, stroke and heart disease;

		Enable providers and payers to integrate and optimize patient engagement in alignment with meaningful use and value-based care guidelines; and

		Support researchers and healthcare professionals as they advance the emerging discipline of population health, which aims to optimize an individual’s care by identifying trends in large numbers of people with similar health status. 