Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ: ISRG) announced on Monday that it has acquired privately held Orpheus Medical. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Orpheus provides clinical and imaging documentation solutions to hospitals. Its technology is used to capture, archive, and share clinical video and images that can be used to improve patient care, and can be integrated into electronic medical record (EMR) systems and vendor-neutral archives (VNAs). From robots to informatics The acquisition of Orpheus marks a major step for Intuitive Surgical in expanding beyond its core robotic surgical systems business. Its da Vinci system is the world's leading robotic surgical system, with 5,582 installed as of Dec. 31. Image source: Getty Images. "The addition of Orpheus will provide customers -- including surgeons, patient care teams and hospitals -- with ready access to and a deeper understanding of their data, which we believe may help our customers improve patient outcomes and lower total treatment costs," said Julian Nikolchev, Intuitive Surgical's senior vice president of corporate development and strategy. While this acquisition wasn't expected, Intuitive's move into health informatics (which focuses on processing data for storage and retrieval) isn't all that surprising. CEO Gary Guthart noted at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January that "healthcare is transforming using data" and that Intuitive is "playing our part in this transformation." He also asserted that making progress in analytics ranked among the top priorities for the company in 2020. 10 stocks we like better than Intuitive SurgicalWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.* David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Intuitive Surgical wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys. See the 10 stocks *Stock Advisor returns as of December 1, 2019 Keith Speights owns shares of Intuitive Surgical. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Intuitive Surgical. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.Source