This week BioTelemetry, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAT) purchased Geneva Healthcare, Inc. for $45 million, continuing the 2018 trend of medical device companies acquiring digital health groups.
BioTelemetry provides cardiac monitoring device manufacturing and monitoring and wanted Geneva’s proprietary cloud-based platform. Its technology aggregates data from device manufacturers’ systems, enabling a company to remotely monitor a patient’s implantable cardiac devices such as pacemakers, defibrillators and loop recorders.
Geneva’s platform provides physicians with a single portal to order patient monitoring, view monitoring results and request routine device checks. BioTelemetry’s cardiac monitoring service will now be supported by a cloud-based, data-driven platform. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2019.
Supplementing a medical device portfolio with a data-driven system could have driven Medtronic plc (NYSE: MDT) to buy Nutrino Health, an Israeli digital health company, back in November 2018. Medtronic manufactures and sells device-based medical therapies worldwide and purchased Nutrino’s food analysis infrastructure and nutrition science platform to integrate it into its Diabetes Group. That deal closed on January 25 this year.
In October, Varian Medical Systems, Inc. bought Noona Healthcare to build up its medical device platform for cancer treatment. Noona developed a cloud-based, mobile service designed to capture cancer patient-reported outcomes. This application lets clinics capture patient information and communicate directly with patients. Varian looked to combine its 360 Oncology SaaS platform with Noona’s patient user interface to offer a robust solution that lets patients actively engage with their cancer care team through treatment, recovery and post-treatment care. No financial terms were announced for either of the 2018 deals.
