An HIT

PTC (Needham, Massachusetts), which provides manufacturers with software and services to meet globalization, time-to-market and operational efficiency objectives of product development, reported that it has acquired Relex Software (Greensburg, Pennsylvania).

Relex provides software and services for analyzing design and field data in order to assist in evaluating and improving product reliability and safety. The company was privately held and has about 50 employees. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The Relex acquisition is a key component of PTC's product analytics strategy. Product development organizations are under constant pressure to comply with international environmental regulations, reliability and maintainability requirements, while lowering lifecycle and product costs. Decisions made to optimize one dimension are likely to impact performance on these other dimensions. These pressures are the impetus for PTC's product analytics strategy.

With product analytics software, PTC aims to provide a comprehensive solution to streamline prediction and analysis of product performance, provide visibility to product development stakeholders and enable effective tradeoff studies.

"The natural synergy between product lifecycle management and reliability engineering makes Relex a logical addition to PTC's evolving product analytics family of solutions and underscores PTC's holistic approach to product development," said James Heppelmann, president/chief operating officer of PTC.

In other dealmaking news, Ingenix (Eden Prairie, Minnesota), a health information, technology and consulting company, said it has acquired AIM Healthcare Services (Franklin, Tennessee) and its affiliated companies, Netwerkes and Ingram & Associates. AIM provides payment accuracy solutions for healthcare payer and hospital clients in the U.S. Terms of the all-cash transaction were not disclosed.

Through its universal connectivity platform, Intellijet, its broad network of payer and provider clients, and its on-site teams of healthcare experts, AIM will contribute to existing Ingenix solutions for preventing, detecting and correcting errors throughout the claims lifecycle. AIM's portfolio also will bolster Ingenix's coordination of benefits capabilities, particularly for federal and state government payer clients.

AIM and Ingenix share the goal of helping clients reduce costs by eliminating administrative complexity. The cost of claims inefficiencies to the U.S. healthcare system is over $150 billion a year, according to mid-range estimates in a recent review conducted by The Lewin Group.

Ingenix and AIM will offer a single source for payment accuracy solutions for health plans and hospitals. Payers and hospitals can more easily identify and reconcile payment inaccuracies, and will no longer need to engage with multiple parties to achieve payment integrity.

AIM's ability to connect hospitals and payers as a neutral third party, identify payment errors, and offer corrective solutions enhances transparency and cuts time and cost out of the claims process, the company said.