Eclipsys Corporation, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Premise Corporation, a privately held industry leader in patient flow solutions.
Premise, based in Farmington, CT, is a leading provider of integrated and clinically focused software solutions and services that help optimize patient flow, streamline communications, enhance operational efficiency, and empower knowledge-based decision-making. With their ease of use and visualization of real-time operating data, Premise solutions have been recognized as the industry`s most intuitive systems for bed management, bed turnover, and patient transport. In 2008, the Premise bed management and patient throughput solutions received the exclusive endorsement of the 5,000-plus-member American Hospital Association (AHA), and Premise is the only Microsoft Gold Certified provider of patient flow solutions.
"Eclipsys and Premise should be a tremendous combination, with Eclipsys` recognized industry leadership in enterprise clinical and patient access systems and Premise`s leadership with patient flow solutions," said Mark L. Andersen, senior vice president of Information Systems and chief information officer of Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS), a joint client. "In these challenging economic times, bed and capacity management will become an even bigger issue. The Premise solution has helped us manage our demand; since 2000, we`ve seen a 20-percent increase in annual discharge volume, and that would have been virtually unmanageable in an environment without this system."
The Advisory Board Company, a respected international industry research and analysis firm, agrees, noting that "Hospitals seeking to relieve capacity constraints in the short run face the imperative of maximizing return on current capacity; contending with increased demand in the here-and-now requires handling more admissions with the current beds and staff - in short, faster patient throughput."
Because of challenges in accessing capital in the current economy, many hospital expansion projects are now on hold. The Premise products, to be renamed Sunrise Patient Flow™, help health systems maximize the utilization of existing inpatient and Emergency Department beds. The solutions are helping clients - many of them world-renowned healthcare providers, including five of the top eight America`s Best Hospitals - reduce length of stay, nursing and housekeeping costs, while improving revenue, quality of care, and patient satisfaction.
Interpreting Advisory Board data, reducing overall length of stay by one day in an average-sized, 300-bed hospital is the equivalent of adding 49 beds and reducing nursing costs by $1 million to $2 million a year. Additionally, through greater usability of existing beds, more patients can be served, with one additional patient per day translating to an average $1.2 million of incremental annual revenue.
Relatively few health systems have implemented these types of operational improvement solutions to date, with HIMSS Analytics reporting that 61 percent of U.S. hospitals alone have no current solution for bed management. "The potential market for these solutions is significant, both in the U.S. and internationally," stated R. Andrew Eckert, Eclipsys president and chief executive officer. "They are easy to install, with rapid return on investment and minimal up-front expense. We anticipate that they will be a very popular addition to our portfolio of Eclipsys enterprise solutions."
Expands Leadership in Enterprise Performance Management Solutions
"The acquisition of Premise, together with our acquisition of EPSi last spring and the availability of our Sunrise Clinical Analytics, helps build out a world-class solution set that supports direct patient care-related activities as well as operational performance management," Eckert said. "Together, these solutions truly help hospitals and health systems effectively manage the business of healthcare and achieve rapid and sustainable improvements in operational efficiency, clinical outcomes, and financial performance."
Premise applications and services now become part of the growing Eclipsys Performance Management™ solution suite that gives health system clinical and operational managers and senior executives the tools to gather, analyze and display enterprise-wide information. This helps them more easily identify areas requiring intervention, leading to improvements in clinical quality, cost-efficiency and patient satisfaction while patients are still in the facility.
"Other vendors provide business intelligence solely in the form of historical reports that give you hindsight but limited insight," Eckert noted. "Eclipsys Performance Management solutions enable healthcare organizations to understand the past, monitor the present and predict or model potential future outcomes as leaders make decisions that keep the organization competitive and operating efficiently."
In addition to the complementary capabilities of Premise`s products with the already robust Eclipsys Sunrise Enterprise™ solution suite, Eclipsys and Premise solutions share a web-based, Microsoft SQL Server platform and go-forward technology direction, which played an important role in the Eclipsys acquisition decision.
"Premise and our other two acquisitions of the past year, EPSi and MediNotes, have definitely expanded Eclipsys` market reach and our position in the competitive HIT marketplace," Eckert stated. "The solutions enhance our existing Sunrise Enterprise solutions to make the Eclipsys portfolio an even more compelling answer for providers seeking to address the ever-changing regulatory and reimbursement environment."
As announced Dec. 31 upon signing of the definitive merger agreement, Eclipsys has acquired all of Premise`s outstanding equity interests. The purchase price was $38.5 million cash, subject to certain holdback escrow provisions and working capital adjustments.
Piper Jaffray & Co. acted as financial advisor to Eclipsys in the transaction.
