A Medical Device Daily

Siemens Financial Services (SFS; New York) reported that it has provided a $29.5 million credit facility to the Avanti Health System (Hurley, Wisconsin) and Asset Funding Group (AFG; Denver) to fund hospital acquisitions in California.

The five-year senior credit facility consists of a revolving line of credit and term loan.

The loan package facilitated the purchase of HealthPlus Holdings, which owns and operates Memorial Hospital of Gardena (Gardena, California) and East Los Angeles Doctors' Hospital (Los Angeles). AFG facilitated Avanti's acquisition through a sale-leaseback of the real property owned by the hospitals.

Avanti says its mission is to build a healthcare system that is regarded as a leader in the areas of quality of care, customer service, employee satisfaction, financial success, and community contribution on a national scale.

In other financing news:

• Authentidate Holding Corp. (Berkeley Heights, New Jersey), a provider of secure health information exchange and workflow management services, reported that the company acquired 547,000 shares of its common stock from a large shareholder at a purchase price of 27 cents a share, representing a moderate discount to the 30-day trailing average closing price on the day, in a private transaction on March 31.

President Ben Benjamin, CFO Bill Marshall and certain members of the company's board, purchased an additional 990,000 shares from the same large investor, at a price of $0.275 a share.

In total, the purchases represent about 4% of the company's common stock outstanding as of the filing of its most recent 10-Q with the SEC on Feb. 10.

• Cord Blood America (CBA; Santa Monica, California), an umbilical cord blood stem cell preservation company, reported that between Feb. 15 and April 6, it reduced its long-term debt by about $750,000, or 12%. This followed a report on Feb. 12 that long-term debt had been reduced by $1 million from Jan. 1 to that date.

The company previously said that a major focus is to reduce debt and strengthen the CBA balance sheet. The company said the effort to further reduce debt will continue throughout 2009.

CBA is the parent company of CorCell, which facilitates umbilical cord blood stem cell preservation for expectant parents and their children.

Collected through a non-invasive process, cord blood stem cells may offer a resource for treating a growing number of ailments, including cancer, leukemia, blood, and immune disorders.