Alibaba Health Information Technology is acquiring 25 percent stake of a medical imaging unit of China Resources Wandong Medical Equipment for RMB225 million (US$35 million), ChinaMoneyNetwork is reporting. As part of the deal, Alibaba Health will get two seats at the company’s five-person board of directors.
The unit, called Wanliyun Medical Information Technology (Beijing), focuses on the construction of medical imaging big data platforms, as well as cloud storage services for the development of remote medical imaging services. Founded in 1955, Wanliyun was China’s first medical imaging company, and today it is the world’s second largest medical imaging product manufacturing base, according to Chinese media reports.
With this investment, Alibaba hopes to gets its share of the cloud-based computing business, to provide remote medical imaging services.
This, however, is not the first time we’re talking about the Chinese tech giant plans to enter the booming digital health market. Back in April 2015, mHealthSpot wrote about Alibaba’s efforts to team-up with relevant partners to build a “cloud hospital” that would make it easier to manage individual patient cases and analyze aggregated health data. We haven’t caught any updates on that story, though.