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Has Your Hospital RTLS Company Been Acquired? Consider Your Options

Last summer, Securitas announced its multi-billion-dollar acquisition of Stanley Security and Healthcare—including Stanley’s real-time location services (RTLS) offerings. It’s just the latest in a series of acquisitions in the health care technology/RTLS space, including Halma’s purchase of CenTrak and Midmark’s purchase of Versus. Stanley itself acquired another RTLS company—Aeroscout—in 2012.

While these acquisitions may prompt breathless headlines in health care business media, they often cause headaches for customers who purchased the acquired companies’ RTLS solutions.

Three Consequences of Hospital RTLS Company Acquisitions

First, when a big company acquires a smaller company, the latter typically becomes a business unit of the former. That means the smaller company’s main products—in this case, RTLS solutions—become just one of many offerings. The people in charge of maintaining, developing, and selling the RTLS solutions may not have deep expertise in the technology or the unique asset management challenges that hospitals face. The new company and its staff therefore may not be responsive to the needs of the customers who purchased the smaller company’s RTLS solution years ago.

Second, if the bigger company already has an RTLS solution, it’s likely not incentivized to provide backward compatibility for the smaller company’s customers. They are often content just collecting maintenance and upgrade fees off the acquired company’s existing RTLS customers without any intent to provide ongoing technical enhancements. For example, when CenTrak purchased Awarepoint in 2018, it required existing Awarepoint customers to purchase new hardware to ensure compatibility with CenTrak’s technology.

Finally, the bigger company generally isn’t interested in investing in the newly acquired RTLS solution to achieve impactful, cutting-edge outcomes for customers. The RTLS solutions of many recently acquired companies are five or more years old—a lifetime in terms of technology development. They don’t incorporate advances like artificial intelligence and machine learning that can radically improve the accuracy and return on investment of an RTLS. The acquired company’s customers are left to make do with increasingly inaccurate systems. Hospital staff lose trust in those systems, and they eventually fall into disuse.

SEE ALSO: Should you replace your old RTLS solution? 8 key questions to help you decide.

Next Steps for Hospital Leaders 

If your hospital purchased an RTLS solution from a recently acquired company, ask that company: What is your commitment to bringing my RTLS up to speed and achieving the kind of outcomes new technology can deliver? 

If you’re not happy with the answer, it’s time to consider investing in a new solution from a company whose primary focus is RTLS. Cognosos is exactly that kind of company.

The Cognosos RTLS solution was developed with a future focus, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver room-level accuracy with lightweight infrastructure. As a SaaS-based company, we are constantly innovating and deploying new features and functionality to ensure customers benefit from the latest developments without incurring substantial new costs. And our staff—from our sales representatives to our customer success team to our engineers—have deep expertise in hospitals and RTLS technology. That means you get attentive, knowledgeable support that facilitates seamless installation and integration, comprehensive training, and a quick path to ROI.

To learn more about how Cognosos RTLS can help achieve your asset management and financial goals faster than your current solution, please contact us today for a custom ROI and replacement proposal.

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