Intuitive Surgical (ISRG 0.59%) announced on Monday that it has acquired privately held Orpheus Medical. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Orpheus provides clinical and imaging documentation solutions to hospitals. Its technology is used to capture, archive, and share clinical video and images that can be used to improve patient care, and can be integrated into electronic medical record (EMR) systems and vendor-neutral archives (VNAs).
From robots to informatics
The acquisition of Orpheus marks a major step for Intuitive Surgical in expanding beyond its core robotic surgical systems business. Its da Vinci system is the world's leading robotic surgical system, with 5,582 installed as of Dec. 31.
Image source: Getty Images.
"The addition of Orpheus will provide customers -- including surgeons, patient care teams and hospitals -- with ready access to and a deeper understanding of their data, which we believe may help our customers improve patient outcomes and lower total treatment costs," said Julian Nikolchev, Intuitive Surgical's senior vice president of corporate development and strategy.
While this acquisition wasn't expected, Intuitive's move into health informatics (which focuses on processing data for storage and retrieval) isn't all that surprising. CEO Gary Guthart noted at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January that "healthcare is transforming using data" and that Intuitive is "playing our part in this transformation." He also asserted that making progress in analytics ranked among the top priorities for the company in 2020.
