Box buys MedXT to take deep dive into healthcare

Box announced Industries last month, with a focus on healthcare, retail and media

Last month, cloud storage company Box revealed a new strategy going forward, one that would help it target industries. It is called, of course, Box for Industries. Rather than offering a one size fits all solution, these, instead, would tailored to specific subsections of the workforce. One of the first industries that Box said it was going after was healthcare.

Now the company is making good on that promise, announcing on Thursday that it has made its first acquisition in that space, picking up MedXT, a cloud-based medical image viewing, sharing and collaboration company.

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed, but it was revealed that the founders of MedXT, Reshma Khilnani and Cody Ebberson, will both be joining the engineering team at Box, and that the MedXT technology will be integrated intot the Box platform in order to "build all-new content experiences for the healthcare industry."

Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based MedXT allows its clients to upload medical images via their Web browser, secure proxy, or DICOM TLS. The images and reports can then be viewed and edited in its Web-based viewer, and can be shared with both referring physicians and patients.

By giving MedXT clients access to Box's platform, it will be that much easier for medical images to be stored and shared, allowing them to treat patients quicker, while also giving patients better access to their own records.

"MedXT’s technology addresses a key hurdle to interoperability. Medical images have long been silo-ed from other clinical systems that house medical records and tests, largely due to the complex imaging equipment used to capture them," Aaron Levie, Box's co-founder and CEO, wrote in the announcement.

"Reshma and Cody both recognized the opportunity to securely bridge the gap between the equipment that radiologists and technicians are using to capture data, and the people they ultimately need to share that data with. MedXT’s technology renders beautiful, shareable previews of DICOM files in the cloud (as you can see in the photo below), and also supports annotations."

While the MedXT technology is going to become a part of Box, it sounds as though the company itself will remain in operation.

"MedXT's core technologies, including our DICOM viewer, will be incorporated into the Box platform. We believe that the combination of MedXT's PACS and cloud-based clinical image sharing tool alongside Box's HIPAA compliant file sharing solution will improve interoperability, care coordination and basic data sharing in the industry," the company wrote in a note on its homepage.

"Your data and your account will remain accessible and we will work closely with you to provide more details in the next coming weeks."

Box's acquisitions

Box is not a company that acquires start-ups very often. In fact, Box has only bought seven companies since being founded in 2005.

Its first acquisition was in 2009, when it bought Increo Solutions, a provider of collaboration and annotation solutions. Box's other three purchases did not come until last year, when it bought Crocodoc, a service for rendering and viewing documents on the web; Folders, a file manager for cloud platforms; and dLoop, a provider of advanced data analytics.

MedXT ix Box's second purchase this year; in June it purchased Streem, a company that allows customers to stream files from the cloud to their desktop computers.

In addition to healthcare, the other industries that Box is  currently focusing on are retail, as well as media & entertainment. I suspect that the company, which is currently IPO-bound, might just wind up making some acquisitions in these spaces in the coming months as well.

(Image source: medxt.com)