LEXINGTON, Ky. – Lexmark International, Inc. has announced the acquisition of Claron Technology, Inc., of Toronto, a leading provider of medical image viewing, distribution, sharing and collaboration software technology. Lexmark paid a cash purchase price of approximately $37 million.

Claron’s enterprise medical image viewing platform offers easy, Web-based access to patient imaging studies from picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) or vendor neutral archives (VNAs), enabling referring physicians, clinicians and specialists to view patient imaging studies and collaborate in real time to improve patient care.

“Claron is pleased to join Lexmark’s Perceptive Software and to bring our combined offering to the healthcare industry,” said Claudio Gatti (pictured), Claron’s co-founder and co-chief executive officer. “By incorporating Claron technology into Perceptive Software’s medical content management solutions, we will further enable healthcare delivery organizations to share the information needed to make better care decisions.”

Claron’s solutions help healthcare delivery organizations provide universal access to patient imaging studies and other content across and between healthcare enterprises.

One of Claron’s leading medical image solutions is a universal Web-based zero-footprint viewer that enables diagnostic interpretation of medical images and related digital information on a variety of computers anytime, anywhere across a healthcare provider’s enterprise. This universal viewer supports viewing of all cleared digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) imaging modalities and both 2-D and 3-D viewing.

It requires no software to download while delivering a medical view comparable to any PACS solution, the company said.

Claron will report into Lexmark’s Perceptive Software. With this acquisition, Perceptive Software expands its offering to healthcare providers by enabling referring physicians and clinicians to access, view and collaborate on patient information and medical images that reside outside the electronic medical records (EMR) systems, while concurrently image-enabling the EMR and providing easy Web-based access via desktop and mobile devices.

Claron and Lexmark’s other healthcare technology acquisitions are enabling Perceptive Software to further expand its medical content management strategy. The combination of Perceptive Software’s content and process management platform; industry-leading VNA functionality to enable centralized storage, management and medical imaging sharing; and the universal viewer, will enable Perceptive Software to offer unique, interoperable solutions with vendor neutrality that help eliminate silos that exist today within, and between, healthcare organizations. The result is improved access to content and better patient care.

As part of this transaction, the surgical navigation portion of Claron will not transfer to Lexmark and will operate under the name Claronav.

“The acquisition of Claron and its medical image viewing, distribution, sharing and collaboration technology further strengthens Perceptive Software’s medical content management offering and demonstrates our commitment to helping healthcare providers fully leverage their technology resources to improve patient care,” said Scott Coons, Perceptive Software president and chief executive officer and Lexmark vice president.