Biosign Technologies has agreed to buy Healthanywhere, a privately held mobile health startup for $4.3 million (Canadian Dollars) in stock. The deal is still contingent on a final asset purchase agreement and approval from TSX Venture Exchange, where Biosign is listed. The companies said they expect the deal to close by early next week, however.
Healthanywhere offers a mobile platform for wellness, self-managed care, and chronic disease management. It's focus areas include hypertension, diabetes, congestive heart failure, asthma, obesity, and mental disorder management. The entire HA platform has received FDA 510k clearance as a class II medical device, according to the company.
Biosign plans to use the HA assets to offer cardiovascular risk assessment, medication optimization, and adverse event monitoring services via smartphones.
HA's assets include a smartphone platform called "Health On the GO" that helps users track vital signs and leverage calendars, reminders and surveys to adhere to their care regimens. HA's "Health at Home" offering is intended for use as a chronic disease management platform and works on various PCs, netbooks or tablet PCs. It includes data capture, educational content and health information exchange between patients and physicians.
"HA has a comprehensive solution for disease and patient management," Radu Leca, Biosign's CEO said in a statement. "We want to integrate it with our measurement system to complete our unique offer: a trusted health information system anyone could use to evaluate and manage their health: online, anytime... anywhere indeed."
The deal marks one of the very few publicly announced acquisitions in the mobile health space. Jitterbug-maker GreatCall's acquisition of Mobile Personal Emergency Response Service provider MobiWatch for an undisclosed amount was the last acquisition. That was almost a year ago -- November 2009.
The only other time we came across Healthanywhere was when BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion's healthcare lead Fraser Edward listed the company among the apps available in BlackBerry's App World. (More here.)
For more on Biosign's HA buy, read the press release here
