St Jude Medical to Acquire Implantable Sensor Vendor Savacor
St Jude announced today that they will pay $50 million for Savacor Inc (recently profiled on MedGadget.com). Additional terms tied to regulatory and sales milestones were not
disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year.
St. Jude Medical will record a $50 million in-process research and
development charge in connection with the transaction.
Savacor currently has a small implantable sensor device in clinical trials both
in the United States and internationally that measures left atrial
pressure and body temperature to help physicians detect and manage
symptoms associated with progressive heart failure.
VISICU Files $65 Million IPO
Telemedicine vendor VISICU has filed with the SEC for an initial public offering. VISICU has raised over $15 million in venture capital in their run up to the IPO.
Morgan Stanley & Co., Wachovia Capital Markets LLC, Thomas Weisel Partners LLC and William Blair & Co.
LLC are leading the offering. Visicu did not disclose the number of
shares it plans to offer or an estimated price range for the IPO.
Visicu earned $10.4 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30 on
revenues of $12.6 million, according to its filing. Last year during
that time, the company lost $4.3 million on revenues of $3.5 million.
While sales from 2003 to 2004 jumped from $2.2 million to $5.5 million,
Visicu also cut its loss from $8.4 million to $4.1 million.
Visicu becomes the second Baltimore company to file to go public in
recent months. On Nov. 14, performance apparel company Under Armour
pulled off one of the most successful IPOs of the year, raising $157
million as the stock price doubled.
[Hat tip: FierceHealthcare]
LIFECOR Wearable Defibrillator
LifeVest is the world's first wearable defibrillator for patients who
are at high risk for sudden cardiac arrest or sudden cardiac death.
LIFECOR has identified potential patient groups that may benefit from
this type of devices over an implantable defibrillator.
- Post-Myocardial Infarction (MI) patients with complications
- Cardiac surgery patients with complications
- Heart-transplant waiting list patients
- Advanced heart-failure patients
- Patients undergoing drug loading with potentially pro-arrhythmic medications
- Patients who need an ICD, but have a condition that prevents or delays surgery (such as an infected ICD pocket)
- Patients who simply do not want to undergo surgery or have an implant
There's a nicely done Flash demo here.
The unit includes an event recorder that documents whenever a patient
is defibrillated – however, no wireless or remote communications
capapbilities are described. They even have an image library on their site, but sadly no product pictures.
Barcode and RFID Use for Improved Patient Safety
The latest issue of Premier's Safety Share email newsletter links to a bunch of online resources for barcoding, RFID and patient safety. These resources are in the form of stories in the current issue of Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare.
- First up is a paper on barcodes and meds administration
prepared by University HealthSystem Consortium. The story provides
great background on the application, research on actual safety
benefits, and a bit on the technology. - The next piece is on “automatic identification,”
and explores both barcoding and RFID as technologies for identification
- patients, drugs, caregivers, etc. This article is a very basic
introduction to applications and technology. - In Intelligent Location, Radianse co-founder Mike Dempsey digs more deeply into RFID technology and applications, include some brief case studies.
- Finally, there's a story on tracking and identification in the clinical lab titled, Labeling and Tracking, Preventing Errors in the Lab that describes a number of applications for tracking specimens and lab orders.
- And finally-finally (I missed this the first time round) is a resource
directory of barcoding and RFID vendors. The directory includes a
rather eclectic group of vendors, ranging from “smart” IV pump vendors
to component companies like Texas Instruments – very interesting.
A nice little treasure trove of patient safety applications for identification technologies.
