A Medical Device Daily

Private equity firm Aurora Capital Group (Los Angeles), reported that it has completed the purchase and merger-of-equals transactions to combine RecoverCare (Radnor, Pennsylvania) and MedaSTAT USA (Louisville, Kentucky), both privately held companies. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The combined company, to be called RecoverCare, is a distributor of wound care and bariatric equipment and solutions to the acute and long term healthcare markets.

RecoverCare offers a national service infrastructure, with 158 service centers and more than 750 employees and a fixed asset inventory approaching 100,000 units. RecoverCare also has durable, quality customer relationships with leading acute and long-term healthcare facility chains, innovative technology solutions, sophisticated asset management practices and growth capital to expand organically and through acquisitions within the rapidly growing healthcare markets of wound care and bariatrics.

Mark Bidner will serve as RecoverCare's CEO and the senior management teams of RecoverCare and MedaSTAT have agreed to remain with the combined company. Tom Smith, former President of RecoverCare, will serve as President of the combined company. Kevin McKim, former President of MedaSTAT, will serve as the company's COO and Robert Owen will serve as the company's CFO.

"With strong and supportive capital partners, I am excited to have completed this compelling and industry transforming transaction," said Mark Bidner, CEO of RecoverCare. "By combining RecoverCare and MedaSTAT — two outstanding organizations — we have created an industry leader to better service the needs of our customers who are under increasing pressure to achieve new levels of efficiency, improve clinical outcomes and continually require new and enhanced products, services and solutions."

In addition to Aurora, Moelis Capital Partners, the private equity business of Moelis & Company, Mark Bidner and management are significant co-investors in the combined enterprise.

In other dealmaking news, Arcadia Resources (Indianapolis), a provider of consumer healthcare services under the Arcadia HealthCare brand, has signed an agreement with a national in-home care provider Comfort Keepers (Dayton, Ohio) to provide DailyMed for Comfort Keepers franchisees in 14 states.

Arcadia said the program with Comfort Keepers will launch this month and includes franchisees in Southern California, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. In addition to access to the DailyMed system, each Comfort Keepers franchisee will receive sales, marketing and customer service from the DailyMed support team.

DailyMed is Arcadia's proprietary drug packaging system that combines patients' prescriptions and over-the-counter medicines and vitamins into compact rolls of packets. Comfort Keepers is a provider of non-medical, in-home care market for seniors and other adults needing care and spans more than 560 operating franchise locations in 47 states in the U.S., and 49 locations internationally.

"Our relationship with Comfort Keepers is the largest geographic expansion of DailyMed to date, and will help seniors served by Comfort Keepers across the nation safely and correctly manage their prescriptions," said Marvin Richardson, president/CEO of Arcadia. From a business standpoint, this is a critical milestone in our plans to continue to develop DailyMed into our fastest growing business segment and to quickly become a leading provider of pharmaceutical services to the senior care market."

Comfort Keepers said it plans to review the expansion of DailyMed into its remaining franchise territories in the later half of 2009 and early 2010. Financial terms of the relationship were not disclosed. Arcadia said that as a result of recent developments with Indiana Medicaid, United Healthcare Group, WellPoint and now Comfort Keepers, DailyMed has become the fastest growing segment of Arcadia HealthCare.

Arcadia is a provider of home care, medical staffing and pharmacy services under its proprietary DailyMed program. It has 72 locations in 21 states.