A Medical Device Daily

An investment group including Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group, Pharos Capital Group and Haas Wheat & Partners reported that they have acquired Nursefinders (Arlington, Texas), one of the largest healthcare staffing companies in the U.S. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The transaction expands the healthcare staffing holdings of Goldman Sachs by joining Nursefinders with travel nurse staffing company, National Healthcare Staffing (NHS; Miami), an existing Goldman Sachs portfolio company.

The combined organization has about $350 million in revenues, 110 offices across the U.S. and a leading or significant market position in each of the four healthcare staffing sub-sectors: per diem nursing, travel nursing, allied health staffing and physician staffing.

Nursefinders, founded in 1974, is a diversified provider of nurse, allied health and physician staffing to healthcare facilities and homecare clients throughout the U.S. Its subsidiaries will continue to operate under three separate brands: Club Staffing, Nursefinders and Linde Healthcare/Kendall & Davis.

"The acquisition of Nursefinders significantly increases our efforts to build a leading provider in the healthcare staffing industry," said Martin Chavez, managing director of Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group. "We believe Bob Livonius and his executive team are one of the best in this business, and joining with NHS allows us to offer our customers a more attractive integrated healthcare service."

Gryphon Investors, a San Francisco-based private equity firm, acquired Nursefinders in August 2004 in partnership with Kaiser Permanente and former Spherion CEO Ray Marcy. Under Gryphon's ownership, Nursefinders expanded into the physician staffing sector with the acquisition of Linde Healthcare/Kendall & Davis in July 2005 and into the allied health staffing sector with the acquisition of Club Staffing in June 2006.

Iomed (Salt Lake City) and ReAble Therapeutics (formerly Encore Medical; Austin Texas) reported that they have completed their merger in which ReAble is acquiring Iomed for $2.75 a share, or about $22 million. The deal was first disclosed in May (Medical Device Daily , May 21, 2007).

Iomed is a manufacturer of drug-delivery devices used primarily for pain management. ReAble is a private medical device company in the rehabilitation and orthopedics markets.

Iomed will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of ReAble, operating under ReAble's Empi division.

Empi is a manufacturer and marketer of pain management and rehabilitation devices. As part of the Empi division, Iomed is expected to continue its manufacturing, customer support and product development functions at its Salt Lake City facility. In addition, Iomed will maintain its field-sales support and continue to distribute its core iontophoresis product lines through its existing network of independent sales agents and distributors.

In other dealmaking news: Ethidium Health Systems (Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania), a developer of clinical information management software and services, said it has acquired exclusive ownership of the VLink health information exchange from Vaceris. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"The acquisition of VLink enables Ethidium to offer RHIOs, IPAs, hospitals, and payors a comprehensive, non-disruptive, cross-vendor, open standards-based solution for sharing clinical information using web technology," said Matias Klein, president and chief technology officer of Ethidium.

VLink is a framework for connecting distributed health information systems. It acts as an "armored courier" which securely delivers sealed, addressed packages containing private health information. VLink works seamlessly with existing information systems and is already fully integrated with many electronic medical records (EMR) and practice management systems (PMS).

Vaceris serves the healthcare community by providing solutions that automate health information exchange and management between hospitals, clinics, labs and physicians.