Vocera acquires Extension Healthcare
Vocera Communications, a leading healthcare communications company, today announced that it has acquired Extension Healthcare for approximately $55 million in an all-cash transaction. Based in Fort Wayne, Ind., Extension Healthcare is a leading provider of clinical, event-driven communication and workflow collaboration software for the hospital environment.
The strengths of the two companies and their solutions will deepen interoperability of the Vocera Communication Platform with more than 120 clinical systems, including electronic health records (EHRs), physiologic monitors, enterprise clinical systems, and biomed devices such as ventilators. It will also extend the scalability of the enterprise-class platform and enable stronger person-to-person and system-to-person workflows within a single system from a single vendor. The addition of Extension Healthcare’s complementary software to the Vocera Communication Platform creates the most powerful and complete mobile communication and collaboration platform on the market.
“This acquisition extends the power of Vocera’s software platform for hospitals and health systems seeking one partner for all of their care team collaboration, workflow and communication needs,” said Brent Lang, president and CEO of Vocera. “In addition to offering a powerful combination of technology, Vocera and Extension Healthcare share a mission to improve care delivery, efficiency and safety, while also improving the lives of patients, families and care teams around the world.”
Todd Plesko, co-founder and CEO of Extension Healthcare said, “It’s inspiring to be part of healthcare’s next generation of technology that simplifies and improves care team collaboration. With our visions aligned and software platforms combined, this new endeavor will make a positive and lasting impact on healthcare delivery.”
Founded in 2009, Extension Healthcare is known in the market for its clinical integration software solution Engage, which features an advanced clinical rules engine that unifies data from multiple sources simultaneously, enables prioritization of notifications, adds patient context, and sends messages to the right care team members on their mobile devices. The Engage platform allows clinicians to be away from the bedside while staying informed about their patients. As a result of faster care team response times and reduced noise, patients report higher satisfaction. Similarly, using information from location tracking systems, Engage helps reduce interruption fatigue and unnecessary alarms by detecting the presence of a nurse at the patient’s bedside.
Selected by more than 230 healthcare customers, the Engage software platform has enabled multi-disciplinary care teams to improve response times, minimize interruption fatigue, and reduce patient falls, among other benefits. The intuitive technology offers widespread interoperability and will expand Vocera’s product portfolio, differentiate its competitive position, increase its customer base, and expand the company’s market reach.
Vocera and Extension Healthcare have collaborated many times and share more than 40 hospital customers across the United States, including several medical centers within the Veterans Health Administration. The acquisition will enable Vocera to expand customer relationships and grow software revenue faster by providing highly relevant cross-selling opportunities. In addition, the complete solution will better position Vocera to win more large system-wide deals, according to Lang.
Berkery Noyes served as the exclusive financial advisor to Extension Healthcare on the transaction.
Vocera will host a conference call at 5 p.m. ET (2 p.m. PT) today, October 27, 2016, to discuss this transaction and the Company’s Q3 2016 results, which were issued in a separate press release today.
Investors may access a free, live webcast of the call through the Investors section of the Company’s website at investors.vocera.com. The call also can be accessed by dialing 844-464-3152, or 508-637-5574 for international callers, and using the access code 81440273. A webcast replay of the call will be archived on the Vocera website.