Fresh on the heels of its lighting business spinoff, Dutch health care equipment maker, Royal Philips, is on the prowl for new billion-dollar-plus acquisitions.

Although specific targets of opportunity have not been announced, the field of health care information — both technology and data — is a potential area of interest, Frans van Houten, CEO of Philips, told Bloomberg recently.

“It has not escaped us that other competitors have also identified health as an attractive marketplace,” Van Houten told the news agency. “Clearly there’s no room for complacency. I continue to be the guy who has a lot of fire in the belly to make sure that we continue to move.”

Size matters, too. The typical target deal could be on the scale of the company's 2014 $1.2 billion takeover of smart-catheter maker Volcano Corp., he noted. But smaller deals cannot be ruled out, he added.

Health care looms large at Philips — it was responsible for 45 percent of last year's revenue. And with just about everyone in the technology sector stepping into the medical space as it rapidly evolves, this is certainly not the year for complacency.

Competitors include Medtronic Plc, but also new players like Alphabet and Apple, which just adds to the pressure to grow in order to dominate in the newly integrating connected hospital and health care space.

This connected health care trend is the key to the company's growth. Pieter Nota, head of Philips’ personal health unit, noted in a recent conference call, stating, “It is already existing today and it will start to play a major role in the course of the coming years.”

Acquisitions will be a necessary part of the path forward, Marcel Achterberg, an analyst at Bank Degroof Petercam in Amsterdam, told Bloomberg, as “the underlying growth in health care isn’t that great.”

Lucky for Philips, then, that the company now has the money to cut the Volcano acquisition debt and also to start looking for new companies to buy, according to van Houten.

“Over time we’ll bring the rest of Lighting to the market,” he told the news agency. “That means that there’s going to be multiple moments of cash inflow. As we then continue to improve our performance, we also generate the cash streams to pursue even more acquisitions.”

Another plus for Royal Philips is its innovation-friendly corporate culture. “They are not tightly bound by the historical conventions of traditional health care providers, the risk aversion to innovation — their culture isn’t like that,” Karen Taylor, research director for Deloitte U.K. Centre for Health Solutions, explained to the news service.

Philips has also pushed internal innovation, pouring 8 percent of yearly revenue into research in forward-looking areas such as informatics, pathology, infertility and pregnancy, and connected wearables.

A recent market study by the company, reported by HCB News, serves to underscore the compelling business reason for such moves in the health care arena.

Its Future Health Index assessed global readiness for the technologically-driven health care revolution. It looked specifically at 13 markets to assess how ready they perceived themselves to be to establish an integrated and connected care system, with results based on a survey of 25,355 patients and 2,659 health care professionals across those markets.

The study found greater openness to these new systems in emerging markets. "What you typically see in emerging markets is that people have basically nothing, and that is a big disadvantage," van Houten told HCB News. "But that also means they have no legacy, and legacy is often in the way of adopting new technologies."

In the developed world, for example, the study found that patients were more eager than doctors to embrace new technology. "The resistance to adopting is a reflection of the more siloed approach in which care is being delivered and being reinforced by a reimbursement system that maintains the status quo of how care has always been delivered," said van Houten.