Concerro, a San Diego-based developer of open-shift and workforce management software, is getting into the disaster-planning business.
The company announced on Tuesday that it has acquired all the assets and related intellectual property of the PortBlue Corporation’s CommandAware hospital incident management system. CommandAware, launched in early 2007, provides capacity and emergency management services that allow hospitals to prepare for, manage and recover from disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and other mass-casualty events.
“The acquisition of CommandAware expands our customer base, broadens our product line and accelerates our strategy of capturing a larger market share of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that assist healthcare organizations improve the efficiency of patient care delivery,” said Graham Barnes, Concerro’s CEO, in a press release. “Both CommandAware and the Concerro enterprise-wide workforce management program are built on the same key skills-based cornerstones of collaboration, ease of use and providing the right information at the right time. CommandAware has already been selected as a regional incident management platform in several states well known for their high frequency of natural disasters. We look forward to further helping hospitals nationwide raise their level of incident preparedness and respond to federal and state mandates to improve the nation’s emergency response infrastructure.”
Based in Los Angeles, PortBlue debuted CommandAware in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the Gulf Coast and challenged already-overworked emergency departments from Florida to Texas. Company CEO Paul Dimitruk said the product “takes the place of the … conventional three-ring binder” by establishing a data sharing system for capacity, equipment and supplies and personnel. CommandAware was launched in hospitals in Florida and Washington and, as a turnkey solution to NIMS/HICS IV compliance, supported by federal grant funding, is now used by more than 250 facilities and government entities, as well as for emergency drills.
“We believe CommandAware will have the resources necessary to provide our fine hospital customers with the support, service and further product development they expect, and enable CommandAware to maintain its position as the leading hospital incident command system in the country,” said Dimitruk. “We believe CommandAware has the potential to transform incident management in healthcare and Concerro is an ideal company to take the product to the next stage.”
Formerly known as BidShift, Concerro’s automated staffing solutions, including ShiftSelect, ShiftConnect, ShiftRewards, StaffReach, VMShift and ConcerroConsult, are used by hundreds of hospitals around the nation, including the Catholic Health system, CHRISTUS Health, Kaiser Permanente, Kindred Healthcare and Tenet Healthcare. Earlier this year, the company signed a deal with the Premier healthcare alliance, a San Diego-based network of more than 2,100 hospitals and 53,000 other healthcare sites, to integrate its solutions with Premier’s LaborConnect program.
