Radiology Partners acquires healthcare AI company for $80M
Radiology Partners is acquiring a key healthcare artificial intelligence firm as it seeks to address staffing shortages across the specialty.
The country’s largest imaging group is buying Palo Alto, California-based Cognita Imaging Inc. for $80 million, Axios first reported Monday. Founded last year by Stanford University scientists, the company offers “comprehensive” AI solutions that help radiologists “work more accurately, efficiently and with greater satisfaction.”
Nashville-based Rad Partners plans to combine the company’s own operating system, MosaicOS, with Cognita’s “cutting edge AI technology and expertise.” With this, the practice hopes to accelerate the development of new AI tools that can expand capacity, improve diagnostic accuracy and bolster patient care.
“Cognita’s foundation models integrated with Mosaic’s platform create a human-plus-AI framework where technology not only expands radiologist capacity but also materially enhances clinical performance,” radiologist Nina Kottler, MD, MS, recently named chief medical AI officer for RP’s Mosaic Clinical Technologies division, said in a Nov. 18 announcement. “These tools are delivering results unlike anything we’ve seen before, all while radiologists maintain full oversight and accountability.”
Rad Partners is already using Cognita’s proprietary vision language models to power Mosaic Drafting—an AI tool that analyzes X-rays and head CTs and prepares preliminary results. The technology has been tested by over 100 radiologists across 95,000 imaging exams, RP noted. It’s demonstrated early success, producing read-time savings of up to 76% while increasing disease detection rates by up to 52%, the practice estimated.
Cognita—which also is marking its exit from “stealth” mode with the announcement—will continue operating as an independent business unit at RP. Kottler and colleagues highlighted how the partnership will give the AI firm vast access to data, with Rad Partners handling over 55 million imaging studies annually. Cognita’s vision language models are now advancing through large-scale independent trials as part of their pathway to U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorization. RP and the AI firm had been working together for over a year on development and validation of the technology.
“Cognita is committed to accelerating access to imaging care across the world, and joining forces with Mosaic allows us to apply our technology at scale for impact while preserving the cutting-edge technology development, rapid innovation and best-in-class AI talent that defines our company,” CEO Louis Blankemeier, PhD, who co-founded the company alongside Zhihong Chen, PhD, and Akshay Chaudhari, PhD, said in a statement. “We’re excited to continue growing a world-class AI engineering team as we bring the next generation of AI-powered tools into widespread clinical practice as part of the MosaicOS platform.”
Rad Partners was founded in 2012 and is backed by Whistler Capital Partners and New Enterprise Associates. The company employs over 4,000 radiologists serving 3,400-plus hospitals and other healthcare facilities. It officially launched the new Mosaic technology services division in July.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.