GHX Acquires IMPLANET's Beep N Track to Accelerate Delivery of Healthcare Industry's First Implantable Device Supply Chain Solution

LOUISVILLE, Colorado and BORDEAUX, France, February 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Announces plans for new end-to-end solution to better manage implantable devices including physician preference items

GHX announced that the company has completed the acquisition of the Beep N Track solution from IMPLANET. The acquisition is the latest move by GHX to expand its extensive healthcare footprint to include the industry's first comprehensive supply chain solution for physician preference items (PPI) and implantable medical devices. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The GHX implantable device supply chain solution will continue the company's commitment to developing industry solutions that allow providers and manufacturers to jointly automate shared business processes for greater efficiencies.  The GHX solution will capture data from product purchase to product usage at the point of care, creating capture capability for compliance, while enabling accurate billing, purchasing and inventory tracking.  

Today, managing implantable devices is a largely manual process laden with lost revenue through incorrect charge capture, inadequate purchasing controls, lack of data for value analysis, and excessive labor and inventory costs. Based on its extensive research GHX believes that better management of PPI clinical, operational and financial processes can help increase revenue capture, lower supply chain costs and improve staff productivity.

"The healthcare market is losing more than $5 billion every year due to the inadequacy of current solutions in the implantable device supply chain," said Bruce Johnson, CEO and president of GHX. "When we talk with our customers, who span the entire healthcare marketplace from suppliers to providers, the need for an implantable device solution is top of the list. They tell us that an end-to-end solution that automates and links the entire implantable products supply chain will save money and eliminate waste. This is precisely what GHX has been doing for the past 12 years in the medical-surgical market. This is an opportunity to help the industry in a way that is a perfect extension of our current mission."  

Beep N Track's traceability solution records near real-time medical device and implant data from creation to point of use. Designed to work with a variety of mobile hardware, as well as bar code and RFID capture devices, Beep N Track helps with recall management, paperless electronic filing, device traceability, stock management, regulatory compliance, order management, procedure validation and inventory management. The data provided by Beep N Track is transformed into actionable information, allowing more efficiency, security and protection for suppliers and providers. According to GHX, the Beep N Track technology will become part of a complete implantable device supply chain and inventory management solution the company is currently developing.

 "We believe that GHX will take Beep N Track to the next level, providing healthcare with a comprehensive industry-wide standard for end-to-end traceability, from manufacturer to patient. Implanet will continue to focus on providing surgeon and patients with a unique combination of products, services, safety and efficiency in Europe, and very soon in the U.S.," said Erick Cloix, CEO of Implanet.

GHX estimates the cardiac and ortho implantable device market is a more than $40 billion market with no current solution addressing the entire healthcare value chain from device supplier to hospital or surgi-center to patient. With this acquisition and the subsequent development of an implantable device supply chain solution, GHX is building on its capabilities in cloud-based technology, expanding its cross-healthcare solution connecting supply chain, finance and clinical professionals with their suppliers and partners.

"The complexity and magnitude of the implantable device supply chain is one that impacts hundreds of manufacturers and literally thousands of providers, and their ability to deliver quality patient care at an optimum cost," said Eric O'Daffer, research director, Gartner. "Solving this level of macro problem takes an organization that has the vision, the resources and perhaps most importantly the support and participation of a significant portion of the industry. GHX has invested the time necessary to understand the problems facing the implantable device supply chain. This acquisition demonstrates its commitment to move quickly to develop a solution that can meet the challenge."  

Beep N Track (http://www.beepntrack.com) was developed in 2007 by IMPLANET, a French orthopedic implant manufacturer.

About GHX

Global Healthcare Exchange, LLC (GHX), a healthcare technology and services company, helps reduce the cost of doing business in healthcare by enabling better supply chain management. GHX makes it easier for hospitals, other healthcare providers and the suppliers that do business with them to drive cost and inefficiency out of their processes. Working with GHX, the healthcare organizations that make up the GHX Global Network are on track to save $5 billion by 2014-savings that can be invested in such things as hiring more nurses, providing care to uninsured children or developing new medical products. GHX is owned by organizations on both the buy and sell side of the healthcare supply chain, including some of the largest companies in the world. Find GHX on the Web, on Twitter@GHX_LLC and on Facebook @GHX.

About Implanet/Beepntrack

Implanet, the contraction of the words Implant & Internet was created in early 2007 by orthopedic industry experts, IT professionals and reputable European investors with a vision to materialize an efficient orthopedic company using highest innovations in information technology and medical devices to deliver solutions for the 21st century healthcare needs:  Better Implants, Cost Efficiencies, Supply Chain Automation, Information On Demand, Diligent Traceability and Security from Manufacturing to Patient.

IMPLANET (http://www.implanet.com), a French based corporation, designs, manufactures and markets orthopedic implants for HIP, KNEE, SPINE, and ARTHROSCOPY surgery throughout the world. IMPLANET designed and deployed in France and abroad for more than 3 years an end-to- end medical device software called Beep N Track. The software automatically captures all relevant supply chain and regulatory data linked to medical devices from the point of manufacture to the point of care and renders the information accessible on demand for authorized stakeholders.