Medidata acquires medical imaging company
Yesterday, Medidata announced the acquisition of Intelemage, a medical image sharing and workflow management company, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition is the company’s first since it acquired Clinical Force in 2011.
“We’ve found a company that we thought was compatible from a technological perspective and a business model perspective,” Glen de Vries, President and Co-Founder, Medidata, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com, “and everything came together.”
Intelemage’s technology allows clients to manage all of their imaging activities in a single environment. The company is currently operational in 85 countries and more than 5,000 global locations – in the last 12 months Intelemage has processed 400 million images.
With the acquisition Medidata offers customers an end-to-end solution to capture, manage, and analyze medical imaging data by integrated Intelemage’s technology into its SaaS platform, the Medidata Clinical Cloud.
“We’re excited to have this capability as part of the Medidata Cloud moving forward,” said de Vries. “It’s really the whole view of the patient you can put on one platform.”
According to de Vries, the new expectation that life science companies have – and should have – is providing a single platform for client’s to control “everything that they need to do in their clinical trial,” including clinical data that they need to manage, operational data, and the final transactions.
“Our clients will be fully integrated; they won’t have to think about separate systems for clinic data and image data or mobile health monitoring,” added de Vries.
Development
De Vries explained that the Intelemage transaction is similar to the company’s three previous acquisitions: they have all been cases where the company found elements that would help it realize its vision of “being in the cloud,” and becoming “the single platform for what you’re doing in clinical trials, transactionally and analytically.”
If that requires expertise and capabilities that the company doesn’t have in-house, de Vries said that the company will turn elsewhere. However, the company also invests heavily in organic development – with a research and development budget reaching well over $100m.
The company also has several medical device clients and a dedicated team working with customers across the industry who are using mHealth technologies, such as wearables and sensors, in their clinical trials. “Over time I expect we’ll continue to see growth in hybrid products,” explained de Vries.
This should position the company well in terms of how it seems the industry moving forward, he explained.
“It’s not just that we’re rounding out our capabilities with what people need today in clinical trials … but we think that the future of the market is going to have even more imaging data required when you’re developing a tremendously important or successful compound device,” added de Vries. “We’re trying to be very forward looking in the way we think about our capabilities.”
