Vocera Communications announced this week that it had acquired alarm management company mVisum for $3.5 million. Vocera has yet to respond to a request for additional comment.
Notably, in April 2013 mVisum settled a lawsuit filed by competitor AirStrip Technologies, which alleged mVisum had infringed on its patents for remote monitoring of patient medical data on smartphones. As part of the settlement, mVisum agreed to no longer offer services that included the “streaming or displaying of real time or near real-time patient physiological data, and products that compress, cache, or buffer patient physiological data on a smartphone or tablet.”
Prior to its patent issues with AirStrip, mVisum inked a number of partnerships with companies that included Philips and Sprint. Royal Philips Electronics formally announced its integration partnership with mVisum in mid-2012. As of September 2012 mVisum’s STEMI Alert smartphone app integrated with Philips TraceMasterVue and IntelliSpace ECG management systems.
mVisum's website, which has already been updated to reflect its acquisition by Vocera, explains that the company's "patented push delivery process enables physicians, nurses and other clinicians to access any type of patient clinical data from any connected information system, viewable in user-friendly formats on almost any smart device available." mVisum is particularly focused on helping healthcare providers overcome alarm fatigue, which refers to clinicians being desensitized to the sometimes frequent sounds of medical device and systems' alerts.
"The acquisition of mVisum is another step in our strategic roadmap to solve one of healthcare's biggest challenges: communication," Brent Lang, the President and CEO of Vocera said in a statement. "Communication breakdowns caused by alarm fatigue have become a top patient safety concern and a regulatory priority. mVisum's alarm management technology instantly delivers data to clinical decision makers and complements our secure, mobile communication solutions to help improve patient care, safety and satisfaction."
Shortly after it was founded in 2008 New Jersey-based mVisum received about $250,000 from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania. The company also raised about $850,000 from investors in 2009, according to an SEC filing. The company also announced a deal with The US Department of Veterans Affairs to test its system in an EKG pilot. In 2011 that relationship yielded another $720,000 for mVisum in the form of a grant from the VA to fund a bigger trial of the technology.
