GE Healthcare Completes Acquisition Of VersaMed Corporation - Acquisition Expands GE Healthcare's Respiratory Care Offering

Main Category: Respiratory / Asthma
Article Date: 27 Mar 2008 - 3:00 PDT

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Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), announced that it has completed the acquisition of VersaMed Corporation, a provider of portable critical care ventilators for respiratory care. VersaMed's innovative product offering will expand GE Healthcare's capabilities in respiratory care management, offering healthcare professionals a wide choice of unique advanced life support ventilators to meet a variety of patient needs and care settings. Financial terms were not disclosed.

VersaMed develops easy-to-use, high performance portable ventilators applicable to a wide range of care settings. VersaMed's flagship product, the iVent201™ ventilator, is an intensive care-grade ventilator designed to be compact and portable, making it ideal for use in hospitals for acute and sub-acute care, in emergency transport and in the home. The iVent201 has already been selected by a number of governmental and healthcare organizations as a key part of their pandemic and other emergency preparedness plans. GE Healthcare's Clinical Systems business is a world class provider of advanced technologies for acute respiratory care. The strong strategic fit between the two businesses will offer substantial customer benefits through complementary product and service offerings.

Omar Ishrak, President and Chief Executive Officer of GE Healthcare's Clinical Systems business unit, said "VersaMed has a strong track record of customer-focused innovation and a product portfolio that is highly complementary to our existing suite of products for respiratory care. We believe that combining the expertise and knowledge of the two businesses will create significant added value for our customers, bringing new technologies to healthcare professionals worldwide. Respiratory care is a key area of growth for GE Healthcare and expanding our skill base and product offering in this area supports our vision of helping our customers meet a wide range of needs, wherever the care setting."

Commenting on the acquisition, Jerry Korten, Chief Executive Officer of VersaMed said "The VersaMed team is delighted to be joining GE Healthcare. The combination of VersaMed with GE Healthcare's resources and global reach will allow us to accelerate our development programs and bring our innovative products to a much wider customer base."

Eyal Dior, President of VersaMed added: "I would like to thank the VersaMed employees who together have successfully grown the company from a mere idea to the strong business it is today. The combination of the two companies will bring real benefits to healthcare professionals involved in respiratory care"

Note in the United States of America, the iVent 201 is cleared by the FDA for use in the following applications: hospitals, home, patient transport and emergency/alternate-site care venues.

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at http://www.gehealthcare.com.

About VersaMed Corporation

VersaMed, founded in 1999 and headquartered in Pearl River, New York, has approximately 100 employees worldwide. VersaMed is a leading provider of software-based, smart ventilators. VersaMed designs and manufactures the iVent line of advanced life support ventilators - ICU-grade ventilators that are compact and portable enough to go anywhere - and sells them around the world to the hospital, sub-acute, emergency transport and homecare markets. VersaMed is a private company led by an experienced team of executives, engineers, software developers and respiratory care practitioners. VersaMed's annual revenues will be in excess of $30 million and have been growing at a rate of over 30% per annum.

GE Healthcare