An Ann Arbor healthcare technology company, with its roots in the University of Michigan, has new ownership which executives say will vastly expand its reach.
AlertWatch Inc., a UM spin-out dating back to 2012, has been acquired by BioIntelliSense Inc., a Denver-based health monitoring and clinical intelligence company that boasts a strategic partnership with Medtronic PLC, the more-than $100 billion Minneapolis medical device giant (NYSE: MDT).
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
AlertWatch’s product, cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and offering data analysis and a patented display of patient data that aims to offer streamlined decision-making for clinical caregivers, will be available to hospitals throughout the country through the Medtronic partnership, according to a news release.
The technology was developed by UM Professor and Chair of Anesthesiology Kevin Tremper and developed within the university’s technology transfer department, now called Innovation Department.
“By joining forces with BioIntelliSense, we are thrilled to greatly expand the reach and adoption of our world-class clinical decision support solution,” Tremper, the company’s founder and president, said in the release. “The workflow automation benefits not only help to reduce hospital stays and costs, but also assist clinicians and nurses by alerting them with highly actionable information that prioritizes and personalizes patient care.”
Justin Adams, AlertWatch’s CEO, echoed that sentiment in an interview with Crain’s on Tuesday.
“The goal is to … try and solve some of the intractable problems that providers have with too much data coming in, too many screens to look at and to really bring it all together into one interface that can tell an at-a-glance story about the patient,” Adams said.
Adams declined to provide a current figure for AlertWatch’s overall reach into hospitals, or any projections given this acquisition. The company will continue to have an Ann Arbor office, where Adams is based.
The company has roughly 10 “core” employees, and many work remotely, he said.
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“The addition of AlertWatch offers healthcare providers comprehensive continuous monitoring solutions, and an accelerated path from adoption to full-scale utilization,” stated James Mault, founder and CEO of BioIntelliSense.
“The patented AlertWatch multi-parameter interface displays and analyzes data from inpatient vitals, the electronic medical record (EMR), laboratory systems and BioIntelliSense medical-grade wearables, to provide clinical intelligence across care settings and acuity levels.”
While a relatively small holder of the equity in AlertWatch, the sale of the company makes for an overall win for UM’s tech transfer efforts. The department reported three exits — IPOs, acquisitions or mergers — last year, according to a report.
Increasingly, the private sector is pushing for much of its needed technology to be developed in the university space, spun out and ultimately acquired, said Drew Bennett, director of software and content licensing at UM’s Innovation Partnerships.
“From our standpoint, this (sale of AlertWatch) is exactly what we like to see,” Bennett told Crain’s. “What I would tell you is there's a lot of feedback from the broader marketplace where they literally are encouraging startup development out of early stage university technologies.”
This story first appeared in our sister publication, Crain's Detroit Business.
