LEXINGTON, Ky. (Jan. 5, 2015) — Lexmark International is acquiring Toronto-based Claron Technology Inc., a leading provider of medical image viewing, distribution, sharing and collaboration software technology, for $37 million, it announced today.
“Digital content in all forms continues to exponentially grow, particularly in healthcare. Physicians, other providers and the health information exchanges must be equipped to utilize this content more quickly and collaborate more efficiently to better serve patients,” said Paul Rooke, Lexmark’s chairman and CEO. “The acquisition of Claron further differentiates Lexmark by providing solutions to help physicians and providers view images across devices and the enterprise, enabling better collaboration and patient care.”
The Claron acquisition is part of Lexmark’s stated strategy to allocate capital to grow its software and data solutions capabilities, while returning more than 50 percent of free cash flow to shareholders, on average, through quarterly dividends and share repurchases.The cash purchase price is funded with Lexmark’s non U.S.-based cash.
“Healthcare is a focus for us,” Rooke said. With the acquisition, Lexmark will be able to offer large medical operations such as hospitals a common platform for handling and sharing images generated by a variety of sources that now all require separate systems to use.
The market for “vendor neutral archiving” repository systems is growing 17 percent a year, Rooke said.
Claron’s enterprise medical image viewing platform offers easy, Web-based access to patient imaging studies from picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) or vendor neutral archives (VNAs), enabling referring physicians, clinicians and specialists to view patient imaging studies and collaborate in real time to improve patient care.
Claron’s solutions help healthcare delivery organizations provide universal access to patient imaging studies and other content across and between healthcare enterprises. The multiple image silos is a pain point for healthcare organizations, Rooke said, and the universal viewer Claron engineers have developed will lead to better diagnoses and treatment decisions.
The Toronto company is small, “but their technology is very very good,” Rooke said. The Claron team will remain intact and continue to operate in Canada.
“The acquisition of Claron and its medical image viewing, distribution, sharing and collaboration technology further strengthens Perceptive Software’s medical content management offering and demonstrates our commitment to helping healthcare providers fully leverage their technology resources to improve patient care,” said Scott Coons, Perceptive Software president and CEO and Lexmark vice president.
One of Claron’s leading medical image solutions is a universal Web-based zero-footprint viewer that enables diagnostic interpretation of medical images and related digital information on a variety of computers anytime, anywhere across a healthcare provider’s enterprise. This universal viewer supports viewing of all cleared digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) imaging modalities and both 2-D and 3-D viewing. It also requires no software to download while delivering a medical view comparable to any PACS solution.
Claron will report into Lexmark’s Perceptive Software. With this acquisition, Perceptive Software expands its offering to healthcare providers by enabling referring physicians and clinicians to access, view and collaborate on patient information and medical images that reside outside the electronic medical records (EMR) systems, while concurrently image-enabling the EMR and providing easy Web-based access via desktop and mobile devices.
“Claron is pleased to join Lexmark’s Perceptive Software and to bring our combined offering to the healthcare industry,” said Claudio Gatti, Claron’s co-founder and co-CEO. “By incorporating Claron technology into Perceptive Software’s medical content management solutions, we will further enable healthcare delivery organizations to share the information needed to make better care decisions. The broad combined product offering and the increased capacities of Claron will also greatly benefit our growing network of global OEM partners.”
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