Awarepoint Acquires PCTS

Real-time location system vendor Awarepoint announced this morning that it has acquired Patient Care Technology Systems (PCTS), a vendor of software that helps hospitals track people and physical assets. Terms were not disclosed.

Charlotte, NC-based PCTS has 60 hospital customers that include New York-Presbyterian, Advocate Health Care, Providence Health & Services, and Aurora Health Care. It will continue operating from its current office, with the PCTS executive team reporting to Awarepoint CEO Jay Deady at the company’s corporate headquarters in San Diego.

Deady was quoted as saying that the combined solutions will allow the company “to capitalize on an enormous untapped RTLS market” in which US market penetration is estimated at 10-12% and around 5% internationally. The company’s value proposition includes reducing medical equipment rental costs, reducing procedure time and nurse labor involved with in locating needed equipment, and ensuring that equipment is correctly reprocessed between patients.

We spoke to Jay Deady on Monday after running a rumor from RTLS Battle predicting that the acquisition would be announced this week. He said Awarepoint’s 93 hospital customers, having realized significant return on investment from the company’s asset management and tracking capabilities, were pressing the company to move quickly into patient workflow solutions that can support discharge planning and real-time monitoring.

“Integrating a workflow engine into our software and building out the workflow library was going to take 18-24 months,” he told us. “At our recent user meeting, our customers told me they are ready to go right now. Awarepoint and PCTS have three shared accounts — Christiana Care, Aurora, and Advocate Good Sam. I visited those clients and got rave reviews about PCTS’s workflow engine and content library. It just seemed logical to meet the needs of clients in accelerating to market and not taking two years to develop.”

Deady says that completing the transaction required “a very fast close” due to competing bids from private and publicly traded companies and a private equity firm.

PCTS’s relationships with other RTLS vendors will continue, Deady told us. “This is not a one-size-fits-all environment. We will continue to work with other technology partnerships. A lot of our clients were asking us about other RFID technologies, such as passive RFID for inventory tracking. PCTS has an RTLS integration engine and can integrate that in being able to play well in the sandbox with other active and passive players. That was a big decision point for us to merge with PCTS.”

Deady summarized the benefit to customers as being similar to the consolidation of hospital clinical systems starting in the late 1990s. “Customers don’t want to go to different companies for technology, inventory management, asset management, hand hygiene, and temperature monitoring. Up until a year ago, a hospital that wanted to deploy all these technologies would be doing business with seven or eight different companies. Our goal in merging with PCTS is to give them one place to go.”