Four months after declaring its intention to enter the American healthcare market, Australia’s iSoft has found a U.S.-based partner.
Company officials announced Wednesday the acquisition of BridgeForward, Inc., a four-year-old Boston-based developer of application integration software that should help iSOFT push its Lorenzo Health Studio, which debuted to American audiences at the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) show and conference last April in Chicago.
“In BridgeForward, we have acquired intellectual property that will significantly enhance Lorenzo’s flexibility and interoperability as a solution to fit health organizations across the entire spectrum of care,” said Gary Cohen, iSOFT’s chairman and CEO. “We welcome BridgeForward to the iSOFT fold, and look forward to working with their talented staff as we boost our impressive offering of solutions for the U.S marketplace.”
"This acquisition means we're channeling the R&D dollars we would have invested in building out integration capabilities in Lorenzo into a world-leading product that's already built," Cohen said in an interview published Thursday in Australian IT.
BridgeForward’s Viaduct platform enables users to design and build complex integration processes that enable legacy applications to participate in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Aside from being offered as a standaloine product, Viaduct will be embedded in SOA-based Lorenzo, company officials said, to “boost iSOFT’s capacity to meet the increased demand for an interoperable, scalable solution that enables the global healthcare industry’s transformation towards full digitization and interconnectivity of patient records. “
“The entire BridgeForward staff is delighted to become part of the dynamic and growing international leader in healthcare IT,” said John Moriarty, BridgeForward’s founder and CEO, who will remain with iSOFT as president of the BridgeForward subsidiary. “iSOFT’s deep commitment to customer satisfaction, technical innovation and patient safety makes for a compatible and comfortable fit. BridgeForward’s many customers throughout the U.K, U.S and Canada will benefit from our ability to provide a broader array of interoperability solutions and services.”
According to terms of the deal, iSOFT paid BridgeFoward shareholders $4.9 million and will pay out an additional earn-out, capped at $10 million, over the next five years.
iSOFT’s Lorenzo platform is now at work in 38 countries spread across five continents, including the United Kingdom’s UK National Programme for IT, and the company isn’t done expanding. Last month, Cohen said the company has about 20 clients in Central and South America and is eyeing business opportunities in Mexico, which is planning to create a national health registry. And just last week, the company introduced Lorenzo to the New Zealand healthcare industry.
