The IBM supercomputer commonly known as “Watson,” which bested Jeopardy greats like Ken Jennings, is getting a big payday — sort of.

IBM Corp. has announced it will buy medical image company Merge Healthcare in a $1 billion deal and the company will combine it with its health analytics unit — the one that includes Watson, according to a Reuters report.

Data and images from Merge Healthcare’s medical imaging management platform will be combined with the cloud-based healthcare system that Watson uses. It will enable the system to analyze a tremendous amount of data as well as difficult questions in natural language. The goal is to help physicians to analyze medical and family history data from patients, and combine it with clinical research.

By doing this, the company hopes to provide cost-effective care that is high quality as well. And it is IBM’s latest attempt at establishing a foothold in the healthcare information technology sector. It’s the third time that IBM has tried to acquire a health-related company ever since it launched so-called “Watson Health” back in the spring of this year.

By making this move, IBM will have access to a huge 7,500 healthcare sites across the nation.

And it will be good for shareholders of Merge Healthcare — depending on their expectations. They’ll get paid $7.13 per share, which is a premium of 31.8 percent of the share’s price at the close of Wednesday. IBM’s shares stayed about the same at $156.33.

There will be an equity portion of about $713.1 million, Reuters estimates.

Watson is an artificially intelligence system that is able to answer questions that are posed in a natural human language, and it was developed by IBM as part of its DeepQA project. It was named after the first CEO of IBM, Thomas J. Watson.