Box Acquiring MedXT

 On a blog, Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO, Box, Inc., wrote:

Today I’m incredibly excited to announce that we are acquiring MedXT, a pioneer in cloud-based medical image viewing, sharing and collaboration.

MedXT (Clariso Inc.) got its start in Y Combinator and is led by two amazing founders with experience spanning the healthcare industry, Microsoft and Facebook. Founders Reshma Khilnani and Cody Ebberson will both join our engineering organization to help integrate their technology with the Box platform and build all-new content experiences for the healthcare industry.

As we announced at BoxWorks last month, we’re focused on a major new initiative: Box for Industries. As Box has evolved from being a simple and secure place to store and share business content, to a platform where enterprises across all industries are re-imagining how they use information, it’s important that we build deeper capabilities on our platform for major verticals. Box for Healthcare is one of our early efforts, since this industry is experiencing tremendous pressure to evolve its approach to collaboration, interoperability and care coordination. We are fortunate to be working with early customers like Stanford Health Care, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Health System, St. Joseph Health and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center to help make healthcare more collaborative and effective than ever before.

This pressure to modernize is being driven by a number of forces: mobile and wearable devices, the cloud, and an explosion of data across healthcare providers, researchers, and the scientific community. Yet the industry’s approach to IT has historically focused on back office systems and basic clinical documentation tools that have poor workflow and sharing capabilities. The absence of true interoperability between systems has long hampered our healthcare system’s ability to deliver efficient, high quality care.

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. 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.

Clinical images are a core part of patient diagnostics, and the expertise of the MedXT team members and their medical image viewing technology will be incredibly important in our effort to deliver HIPAA-compliant sharing and collaboration for all critical content types. Together with MedXT, we will pursue the vision for a healthcare system where physicians have instant access to critical medical procedures and data from tablets; patients can obtain their personal medical records and information without friction; and institutions can share healthcare outcomes and data across organizations, securely.

Of course, we can’t do this alone. While the core Box product will continue to address a broad range of horizontal use cases, it’s our platform and ecosystem that will support all-new capabilities for industries. As such, we will rely heavily on a vast number of strategic partners and a developer ecosystem to enable robust enterprise workflows, improved data capture and unique experiences for our customers. We look forward to changing healthcare together.