Connected care keeps expanding: Stryker acquiring Vocera Communications for $3B, Baxter’s close of Hillrom sale for $12.5B

January 12, 2022 | by

Medical device companies that have grown into or acquired tech and analytics are now buying into communications systems to connect it all. Massive medical/surgical/orthopedic device company Stryker is acquiring clinical communications/coordination workflow systems Vocera Communications for a snappy $2.97 billion. The deal is for $79.25 per share and is expected to close in this quarter. Vocera is expected to expand Stryker’s Advanced Digital Healthcare and connect devices and digital communications both for clinical caregivers and with families. Vocera is considered to be an innovator in communications systems that connect clinical and operational systems, and is presently in 2,300 medical facilities internationally. No management transitions were disclosed. Release.

Hillrom, another device company mainly in cardiac and hospital monitoring which last year had broadened its remote patient monitoring and connected care portfolio, was in turn acquired by medtech giant Baxter International last month. Hillrom had acquired Bardy Diagnostics and EarlySense about a year ago [TTA 4 Feb 21], and in 2019 Voalte Communications, directly competitive with Vocera. In 2015, Hillrom bought Welch Allyn which boosted it into digital health from primarily hospital furniture. The purchase price closed at $10.5 billion and including Hillrom’s outstanding debt obligations, the acquisition in total was $12.5 billion. From Baxter’s release, the “legacy” Hillrom and Welch Allyn brands will be introduced into international markets and integrated into Baxter’s technologies. The lack of mention of Hillrom, the ‘legacy’ references, and no mention of Hillrom management transitions in the release, is a sure sign that the brand will be sunsetted very quickly, along with its management team. Medtech Dive. Also a snappy tip o’ the cap to HISTalk.

Is digital health neglecting The Big Preventable–medical errors?

September 6, 2014 | by | 1 Comment

 

Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the US – third only to heart disease and cancer – claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year.

(US Senate hearing, cited in HealthcareITNews 18 July 2014)

At the end of last month, this Editor questioned the efficacy of our current state of ‘consumer engagement’ in Patients should be less engaged, not more. The ‘less engaged’ was a call for simplification: regimens and devices which were easier to use, less complicated and far easier to fit in everyday life. (Aesthetics helps too.) Back in 2013, HeartSister/Ethical Nag (and Canadian) Carolyn Thomas called for health app (and by inference consumer engagement) designers to ‘skate to where the puck is going’–as in “For Pete’s sake, go find some Real Live Patients to talk (and listen) to first before you decide where you’re going!” Often it seems like these apps and platforms are designed in a vacuum of the entrepreneur’s making. The proof is the low uptake (Pew, Parks, IMS) and the apps’/programs’ lack of stickiness after all this time (Kvedar 8 Sep blog post).

Now Laurie Orlov tells us we were looking at the wrong puck, as analysts do. First, all that ‘nudging’ and all those apps haven’t moved the needle on diabetes and obesity. Second, why are app developers neglecting that third largest killer, preventable medical errors? Add to that 400,000 yearly–over 1,000 per day–the 10,000 estimated patients every day who suffer serious complications. (more…)