Acquisitions & Agreements
Acquisitions & Agreements
• Ceres Group (Strongville, OH) has reached agreement with HealthAxis.com, an e-commerce company, to offer insurance products over the Internet. The products will be available through Provident American Life and Health Insurance Co. (Norristown, PA), a subsidiary that is being acquired by the Ceres Group. The first product offered is expected to be managed care individual insurance.
• Cognia Bioinformatics (New York) has reached agreement to become the exclusive U.S. and Canadian distributor of the Transfac database from Biobase Biological Databases/Biologische Datenbanken GmbH (Braunschweig, Germany). Transfac is an annotated database of transcription regulation, which is necessary for the understanding of diseases. It includes functional annotations on approximately 2,500 transcription factors and 8,000 corresponding binding sites.
• Eclipsys (Delray Beach, FL) has completed its acquisition of Transition Systems (Boston). Shareholders of both companies approved the deal Dec. 30. Prior to Eclipsys completing the purchase, TSI completed its acquisition of HealthVision (Santa Rosa, CA), a developer of integrated but separable clinical modules for healthcare providers. Eclipsys says it now has one or more of its products in more than 1,300 integrated health systems, medical centers and hospitals in North America, the United Kingdom, Western Europe, the Eastern Rim, and Australia.
• Equifax (Atlanta) and Medicheck Services (Los Angeles) have reached an agreement for Equifax to deliver patient identification verification and financial information services through Medicheck Services’ point-of-service insurance verification systems. Hospitals that use the service will automatically confirm patient identification and receive financial information during the admissions process.
• First Consulting Group (FCG; Long Beach, Calif ornia), a provider of information management services for the healthcare, pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, has acquired Pareto Consulting (London), a healthcare information technology consulting firm. FCG’s chief executive officer, Luther Nussbaum, said the purchase, along with the company’s acquisition of Greenhalgh & Co. (Macclesfield, U.K.), will make his firm the leading operations and process improvement consulting firm in the U.K. and Irish healthcare consulting markets. Pareto reported 1998 revenues of $2.5 million. Financial details were not disclosed.
• InfoCure (Atlanta) has acquired Radiology Manage ment Systems (Santa Monica, CA), a provider of practice management systems for radiologists. The sale will be accounted for as a pooling of interests. Radiology Man agement Systems supplies information, image, and billing systems, and InfoCure provides practice management software for the radiology field. The acquisition of Radiology Management Systems marked InfoCure’s ninth acquisition of a practice management company in 1998 and will add 2,000 customers to the firm’s customer base, the company said.
• Metropolitan Health Networks (Boca Raton, FL) has completed a long-term agreement with CPC of America (Sarasota, FL) to provide exclusive MSO services to CPC-owned and joint-venture facilities. The agreement includes the cross-marketing of each company’s products and services. The deal will allow CPC to expand its co-source joint ventures for Counter Pulsation Care services to cardiology practices, managed care organizations, hospitals and other markets in South Florida.
• National Data (Atlanta) has acquired JRC (Preston, U.K.) from its parent company, Taylor Nelson Sofres plc. JRC provides systems for pharmacies in Britain. This follows National Data’s purchase of two other U.K. companies Chemtec Systems Ltd. and Hadley Hutt Computing Ltd. last year.
• Phase Forward (Waltham, MA) has formed a partnership with InfoMedics (also Waltham) to combine features of their respective product lines. The products include Phase Forward’s InForm, a web-based solution for collecting, monitoring, and cleaning of data, as well as project management of clinical trials, and InfoMedic’s TLC, which uses computer-controlled telephone interviews to collect information on the health status of patients with chronic diseases and other conditions.
• ProxyMed (Fort Lauderdale, FL) has completed a merger with Key Communications Services (New Albany, IN). Under terms of the deal, ProxyMed has issued 2,078,106 shares of common stock valued at $21.9 million. The transaction will be accretive to earnings. Key Comm uni cations manufactures, distributes and services laboratory results reporting communication products. ProxyMed is a healthcare information service company that provides on-line clinical and financial electronic data interchange services to providers and laboratories.
• Reuters (New York), the international news and information group, has sold its healthcare subsidiaries, Reuters Health Information and Distal SA, to Cegedim SA (Paris). Cegedim is a European supplier of healthcare systems and medical information services. In addition to its news operations, Reuters designs and installs enterprise-wide information management and risk management systems for financial markets.
• StorageTek (Louisville, CO) a provider of network storage, has entered into a non-exclusive, multi-year co-marketing agreement with Siemens Health Services (Erlangen, Germany) to integrate, service and support scalable, high capacity and high performance medical image and data archive solutions. The agreement brings together StorageTek’s medical image archive solutions with Siemens’ medical imaging products. StorageTek’s products consist of an integrated combination of automated tape cartridge systems, RAID disk, storage management software and professional services. StorageTek and Siemens have integrated systems installed and in full production at two U.S. radiology departments in the U.S. Siemens Health Services is a division of Siemens AG’s Medical Engineering Group.
• Summit Medical Systems (Nashville) has completed the sale of assets of its healthcare provider software business to Velos Medical Informatics (Fremont, CA). Velos will immediately assume responsibility for support and service of virtually all of Summit’s Crescendo!, Vista, and DOS software products. Summit said it will now focus exclusively on providing consulting and specialty clinical research services for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device manufacturers.
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