Qualcomm Buys Capsule to Unite Health Data Across Hospital & Home

Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) said its Qualcomm Life subsidiary has acquired Capsule Technologie, an Andover, MA-based healthtech systems company with more than 1,900 hospital customers in 38 countries. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Qualcomm bought Capsule from JMI Equity and Bulger Capital Partners, which together held a majority ownership stake in the company since 2012, according to Aaron Tilley in Forbes.

Capsule, founded in 1997, specializes in software tools that integrate medical devices with software systems used by hospitals and healthcare organizations. The company’s SmartLinx technology supports more than 730 medical devices—collecting medical device data from wherever a patient may be and transmitting it to any information system.

Qualcomm Life is in the same business, although it’s more focused on gathering data from outside of hospitals and clinics. Its core technology is a wireless gateway device that collects and encrypts data transmitted from patients’ medical devices and personal mobile devices, and enables healthcare providers to access the data in the cloud.

Qualcomm Life says it is creating one of the world’s largest open connected health ecosystems to deliver intelligent care by combining its wireless expertise and ecosystem of connected medical devices outside of the hospital with Capsule’s know-how in connecting medical devices, electronic medical records, and IT systems across the hospital enterprise.

Capsule has 212 employees and generated almost $61.4 million in revenue last year, according to a 2015 ranking of the 100 top healthcare informatics companies by the trade magazine Healthcare Informatics. A spokeswoman for Qualcomm Life said the wireless company would not disclose the number of employees at Capsule, or say how the two companies’ workforces will be combined.

Capsule will keep its name as a subsidiary of Qualcomm Life, Capsule CEO Gene Cattarina wrote in a blog post today. The resources of the new parent company will “support and facilitate the further development and evolution of our products and services,” Cattarina added.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm has been undergoing a strategic review of its businesses that it started in July, when the wireless technology giant said it planned to lay off 4,700 employees. The company has come under pressure from some investors to get its costs under control, and to consider selling its wireless chip business.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.