News/deals roundup: Connect America finalizes Philips aging/caregiving buy; Amedisys-Contessa $250M hospital-at-home; UK’s Physitrack $20M IPO, Dutch motion tracker Xsens

Kicking off our week….

Connect America closed today (6 July) the purchase of Royal Philips’ Aging and Caregiving line of business. This includes the top basic personal emergency response system (PERS) device provider, Lifeline. Purchase price by Connect America’s owner, Rockbridge Growth Equity, was not disclosed. For Connect America, they now top 900,000 subscribers to PERS and monitoring services. At this point, the combined business will have 1,500 employees and 3,000 provider partners. Lifeline also includes services such as 24/7 response with their products: the HomeSafe traditional home PERS with and without AutoAlert fall detection and GoSafe2 mobile PERS with AutoAlert.

There is no indication from the company release or the brief Mobihealthnews article on whether the Lifeline brand name or others from Philips will be retained. Lifeline’s history dates back to 1974, with Philips adding the AutoAlert, HomeSafe, and GoSafe product after their purchase in 2006. Other undisclosed considerations are integration and rationalization of the current Connect America PERS and monitoring products with Lifeline. There is also a promotional partnership agreement with AARP that likely–but not necessarily–will transfer with the purchase. This Editor can tell you that a seat at AARP’s poker table requires a tall stack of chips.

Our earlier article on the acquisition profiles Connect America, Lifeline, and the decline of traditional/mobile PERS with the rise of accessible wristwatch and band forms that don’t scream ‘I’m at risk of falling and not being able to get up!’

Home healthcare provider Amedisys announced their $250 million acquisition of Contessa Health, extending into hospital-at-home and skilled nursing-at-home. As our Readers who looked at Ziegler’s analysis [TTA 25 June], this is a hot and tech-driven care area. Amedisys is claiming that they are the first home health, hospice, and personal care service provider to expand into Contessa’s business, which is hospital-at-home and skilled nursing facility (SNF) at-home including palliative care services launched recently with Mount Sinai Health System (NY). Contessa will operate as a separate division of Amedisys, which plans to invest in both the future growth of Contessa and their proprietary informatics platform CareConvergence with the aim of creating a “premier home-based health system”. The acquisition is expected to close on 11 August. Contessa has both hospital partnerships, which are the bulk of Amedisys’s client business, and joint venture/payer partnerships. Amedisys release, Hospice News

The UK’s Physitrack quietly went public with a raise of over $20 million. The IPO was listed on 18 June on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market (Nasdaq Nordic, Sweden and Finland) earlier this month with an original offering of SEK 40 ($4.69) per share with 4.4 million shares in the offering. The market value is estimated at SEK 624 million ($72.5 million). Unfortunately, you cannot look beyond this investor page if you are in the US, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, South Africa, or South Korea as citizens of these countries cannot invest in their shares. Physitrack is a digital physical therapy plus patient engagement company headquartered in London with offices in Santa Monica, Houston, and Utrecht. It was in the first group of the NHS’ Digital London accelerator program and now is distributed in 100 countries serving 1 million patients. Mobihealthnews, Baker McKensie (legal advisor announcement)

And keeping it physical, Xsens, a Dutch 3D motion capture and attachable sensor company for therapy and ergonomics study, is extending into Automatic Reporting as part of its online MotionCloud platform. A full report, graphs, and a digital recording of an avatar completing the movements can be available to physiotherapists, health specialists, and ergonomic consultants in under two minutes. In addition, they announced a new Awinda Starter system which has their proprietary motion-tracking technology at a more affordable price. Xsens press release, Mobihealthnews

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Comments

  1. Thanks for the update regarding Connect America.

    Perhaps a certain irony as Connect America’s President Richard Brooks used to be CEO of Healthwatch, a successful PERS provider based in Florida, that was itself taken over by Philips/Lifeline back in 2007.

    • Donna Cusano

      Adrian, thanks for bringing that up. Yes, that is a full circle type of irony!