(Bloomberg) -- IBM has agreed to purchase Truven HealthAnalytics for $2.6 billion, its fourth health data-relatedacquisition in less than a year.

Read: The pitfalls of health care's addiction tobig data

Closely held Truven provides cloud-based data management andanalytics to more than 8,500 health-care clients, includinghospitals, insurers and government agencies, the companies saidThursday in a statement.

The deal is expected to be completed later this year, they said.Veritas Capital, a New York-based private equity firm, currentlyowns Truven, according to IBM.

The acquisition of Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Truven will beInternational Business Machines Corp.’s biggest purchase in thethree years under Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty.

IBM has invested heavily in data and technology to improve itsanalytics offerings to the health-care industry, centered on itsWatson Health business unit.

Watson technology uses machine learning algorithms to provideprescriptive and predictive analyses. With more data, thesealgorithms work better and can provide more useful insights.

Read: Can an algorithm prove you won't quit yourjob?

“Most of the data in health-care is in disparate databases,”Deborah DiSanzo, General Manager at IBM Watson Health, said in aninterview. “The strategy of IBM is to bring this data together anddemocratize it so that both IBM and our ecosystem of partners canbuild health solutions on top of it.”

IBM rose the most in three years, gaining 5.7 percent to $133.31at 10:16 a.m. in New York. The shares declined 8.4 percent thisyear through Wednesday.

The success of Watson--which Rometty has called her moonshot--isintegral to IBM’s future as the company struggles to reverse salesdeclines for the past 15 consecutive quarters.

The Armonk, New York-based company last year bought MergeHealthcare for $1 billion to gain medical-imaging data andtechnology. IBM also acquired health-care big data analyticsprovider Explorys and population health technology sellerPhytel.

After integrating Truven’s data from about 215 millionindividuals, IBM will have amassed various kinds of health- relatedinformation from 300 million patients, the company said.

IBM intends to use the data from Truven, Merge Healthcare,Explorys, and Phytel to focus on creating insights into value-based care, which the U.S. has been shifting toward and allowspatients to pay for health-care based on outcomes.

All areas in health-care are “converging around value-basedhealth-care delivery,” Truven CEO Mike Boswood said in aninterview. “As part of Watson Health, we will be able to far moreeffectively contribute to how those changes are implemented.”

Copyright 2018 Bloomberg. All rightsreserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten,or redistributed.