IBM's $1 billion buy of Merge Healthcare to boost Watson's sight

IBM's love affair with Watson continues. Big Blue is buying Merge Healthcare, a provider of medical imaging gear, and plans to incorporate that technology into its Watson franchise. Merge's technology is used by more than 7,500 healthcare sites in the U.S., according to the Armonk, N.Y. based company. Now Merge's know-how will be added to the Watson Health Cloud mix to provide "new insights from a consolidated, patient-centric view of current and historical images, electronic health records, data from wearable devices and other related medical data, in a HIPAA-enabled environment," according to IBM's statement. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a regulation designed to protect patient data confidentiality.