Qualcomm Life, a healthcare-focused subsidiary of the San Diego mobile chipmaker, announced on Monday that it has acquired Capsule Tech, a company that helps healthcare facilities collect and process data coming off medical devices. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Qualcomm bought Capsule from JMI Equity and Bulger Capital Partners, which had held majority ownership stakes in the company since 2012. Qualcomm Life's main product is 2Net, a home gateway device that collects and encrypts biometric data coming off a patient's medical devices. Once the data is collected in the gateway device, it's sent to a cloud backend for doctors or medical institutions to access. This allows doctors to better keep track of patients when they're at home. Founded in 1997, the Andover, Massachusetts-based company Capsule does something similar to Qualcomm, but does it instead for medical devices physically located in hospitals and other healthcare clinics. Capsule builds the hardware that helps translate all the data coming off medical devices into digital information, and then plugs that data into backend management systems. The company has already built up a pretty big business here -- it has more than 1,900 hospitals signed up as customers in 38 countries. “Hospitals today are looking at less than 1% of the data they’re generating. They don’t have the infrastructure,” said Chris Bulger, managing partner at Bulger Partners. “Capsule is by far the leading provider of infrastructure solutions for collecting and analyzing all that data.” With the acquisition, Qualcomm is aiming to create a more comprehensive platform for how patient health is tracked. “We now have the largest ecosystem of connected medical devices with Capsule,” said Rick Valencia, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm Life. “We’re extending our reach from the home to the hospital and all the points in between, so wherever the patient might be. We’ll create the connective tissue to bring all this data back into the system.” Best known for its chips that go into many of today's premium Android smartphones, Qualcomm has been looking for new markets to fuel future growth. The smartphone market (where it has amassed most of wealth) is going through some major shifts and it's getting harder to make a decent profit for many legacy companies. The top-tier market has solidified around Apple , and Chinese phone makers offer cheap and increasingly high-quality phones. As with many tech giants, one area that could potentially offer the next major growth opportunity is in the Internet of Things, the broad term for the rapidly growing number of smart, connected devices out in the world. Qualcomm's 2Net product fits into that category. It started 2Net about four years ago and currently sells the product to more than 500 companies to help them collect patient data in the home. “We launched 2Net with the belief that there is going to be a fundamental shift in the way healthcare is delivered,” Valencia said. Updated to add comment from Bulger Capital Partners.
Qualcomm Life has announced the purchase of Capsule Tech, a company that aids healthcare facilities through retrieving and processing data from medical devices. Qualcomm now aims to make a greater platform for the tracking of patient health, enabling healthcare providers to improve the remote monitoring of patients whilst they are at home.