River Cities Capital Funds is one of the most active and experienced growth equity funds in healthcare and information technology (IT). With over $500 million raised and more than 100 investments made, River Cities has established itself as a preferred partner among the entrepreneurial and private equity communities. The firm is currently seeking new investments for its fifth fund and recently marked its first investment out of Fund V in Trax Technologies.

Over the past 15 years, River Cities has been actively engaged in the state of Ohio, helping to build 21 companies of which have, on average, created 75 jobs during River Cities’ investment tenure. Most recently, River Cities celebrated the successful expansion of an Ohio-based company, Orthohelix Surgical Designs, Inc. The firm provided capital and intellectual resources to help this specialty orthopedics company scale from roughly $4 million of revenue at the time of our initial investment to its current $30 million run-rate. During the four-year investment period, Orthohelix’s high-skilled Ohio workforce grew from 16 to 60 employees. In August, 2012, the company agreed to be acquired by Tornier (Nasdaq: TRNX) for total consideration of $155 million. The outcome generated more than 5 times multiple of capital and returned almost 40% of River Cities Fund IV commitments. Tornier plans to bring even more jobs to Ohio by concentrating its entire lower extremities business unit under the Orthohelix leadership in Medina, Ohio.

The firm’s performance is driven by the ability to access, evaluate, transact and build companies that can lead the transformation of specific market segments by pursuing large, established markets with disruptive technologies or service offerings that are significantly “better, faster, cheaper” than incumbent solutions.

The multi-generational team of seven partners has more than 125 combined years of investing experience and several investment cycles working together, which provides the perspective to discern and evaluate the critical elements of a potential investment. In their prior careers, the investment managers developed analytical frameworks through experience in operations, engineering, accounting, legal, strategic consulting and investment banking.

River Cities participates as a trusted partner side-by-side with company executives to provide resources and services to leverage their time and efforts. The firm seeks to be a business partner first and a capital provider second. The firm invests significant human capital to leverage lessons learned, both positive and negative, during the course of more than 100 investments.

The firm’s latest endeavor, Fund V, will continue River Cities’ strategy of making sub-$10 million growth equity investments in capital-efficient, market validated growth stage healthcare and IT businesses that have a material customer base and are nearing profitability.  River Cities maintains direct contact with earlier stage investors, CEOs and service providers, sourcing thousands of potential investment candidates each year.

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“Our customers operate technical computing environments where infrastructure software like Univa Grid Engine is a key component. This partnership allows us to support our customers on all levels, giving them more options to use their compute clusters in the most efficient manner,” says Gerd-Lothar Leonhart, CEO of s+c. “Additionally, the possibility to integrate Univa Grid Engine with Hadoop systems opens up new opportunities to optimize the usage of Big Data installations.”

A subsidiary of the Bull Group, s + c offers IT services, solutions and software designed for the efficient use of complex computer environments in the fields of research, development and computation. This partnership enables s+c to sell Univa products to its core customer base that rely on HPC infrastructures, grid computing and Big Data solutions, including: automobile manufacturers and suppliers, microelectronic component manufacturers, aerospace companies, chemicals and pharmaceuticals companies, and scientific research facilities.

“The s+c team works with the world’s largest manufacturers and HPC environments, making them the perfect partner for us,” said Rob Secontine, VP Sales & Marketing, Univa. “Our partnership with s+c validates Univa’s solutions as core ingredients in the HPC and Big Data mix. The s+c team works extremely closely with their customers and therefore understands their requirements better than anyone else, so s+c are a natural partner for us.”

Univa Grid Engine, Univa’s core product, is the industry-leading distributed resource management platform that enables shared infrastructures under multiple workloads including Hadoop, a Big Data software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications. Univa Grid Engine has been proven to perform in production environments such as:

• 4 of 5 Top sites by core count
• 4 of 5 Top Enterprise sites
• 2 of the Top Oil & Gas companies
• 4 of the Top 7 Research sites

About Univa Corporation

Univa, the Data Center Automation Company, is the leading provider of automation and management software for computational and big data infrastructures. Our products and global enterprise support give our customers the power to manage their entire computational space, no matter how big or where it is deployed. Many of the leading brands in the world depend on Univa’s unsurpassed expertise, and premier services and support. Univa is headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, USA, with offices in Markham, ON, Canada; Austin, Texas, USA and Munich, Germany.

About science + computing

science + computing ag (s+c), a subsidiary of the Bull Group, offers IT services, solutions and software for the efficient use of complex computer environments in the fields of research, development and computation. A particular focus of the business activity is on the market of “Technical Computing” (CAD, CAE, CAT).

s+c concentrates on the optimal design of open and distributed computer systems and has years of experience in the operation and administration of complex Unix, Linux, Mac and Windows environments.

Currently around 300 employees are working for s+c at four locations in Tuebingen, Munich, Duesseldorf and Berlin. Among s+c’s customers are Audi, BMW, Bosch, Daimler and Porsche. The company cooperates with distribution partners in France, Italy, Japan and the USA. In 2012, s+c achieved a turnover of 29.61 million euros.

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Dr. Michael McKenna

Advocate Lutheran General
To streamline clinician-to-clinician communication both within the hospital and between the hospital and other healthcare facilities, Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Ill., implemented a rules-based electronic system. The system, called PerfectServe, establishes standard, HIPAA-compliant communication protocols based on clinicians’ schedules and their preferences for how they want to be contacted by other clinicians across all modes of communication — including text messaging, which is on the rise. The system takes into account vacation days and other contextual factors, allowing clinicians to contact the appropriate person directly without the delays and confusion associated with traditional pagers that may not account for these factors.

“It allows us to have fewer delays and more timely, secure communication between caregivers,” says Michael McKenna, MD, vice president of medical management and CMO of Advocate Lutheran General Hospital.

Before Lutheran General implemented the communication system, there were approximately 40,000 to 45,000 communication “transactions,” or calls, among Lutheran General’s roughly 1,100 physicians each month, according to Terry Edwards, CEO of PerfectServe. After implementation, this volume decreased to approximately 30,000 to 33,000 due to streamlined, secure communications.

Terry Edwards

ACOs and coordinating care
The rules-based communication system also has the ability to set up direct links between hospital providers and affiliated outside providers, such as primary care physicians. This link enables providers to easily share discharge information and follow up on patients’ progress after hospital discharge. This connection among different kinds of providers is particularly helpful for ACOs.

Oak Brook, Ill.-based Advocate Health System, parent system of Lutheran General, has an ACO called AdvocateCare — a partnership with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois — and a Medicare Shared Savings Program ACO. Rules-based communication among providers within and outside the hospital is crucial for ACO participants to coordinate services throughout the continuum of care. “We have responsibility for populations. We have to think outside of the walls of just the hospital,” Dr. McKenna says. “We need to get hold of physicians and other caregivers in ways we didn’t do in the past.”

Improved communication between hospital and outside providers not only facilitates care coordination, but it also has the potential to increase patient and physician satisfaction. Hospitals should therefore consider their communication strategy as they continue to strive toward the triple aim of high-quality care, lower costs and enhanced population health.

Source: http://www.beckershospitalreview.com

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EndoChoice’s Fuse system is a proprietary arrangement of three small cameras at the tip of a flexible GI endoscope. By using three cameras, the Fuse system allows doctors to see nearly twice as much surface area as they can with traditional endoscopes that only use one camera. Because of the folds that occur naturally in the colon and stomach anatomy, problem areas can easily go undetected when using traditional endoscopes. The Fuse system allows GI doctors to see into and behind those folds.

In a multi-center trial conducted in the U.S., Europe and Israel, Prof. Ian Gralnek and a team of researchers performed a series of colonoscopies comparing traditional endoscopes and the new Fuse system. The endoscope used in the first examination was selected randomly. After the first inspection, each patient immediately underwent a second colonoscopy performed by the same doctor, but with the competing endoscope. The 185 patient trial showed traditional colonoscopes missed 42% of adenomas, while the Fuse system missed just 8%.  After 28 adenomas were found using traditional endoscopes another 20 were found by Fuse for an incremental find rate of 71%.

“Traditional endoscopes provide up to 170 degrees of forward vision. The advantage of Fuse is that it allows endoscopists to examine twice the anatomy with a wide 330 degree view,” said Ian Gralnek , MD, MSHS, FASGE, Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Department of Gastroenterology, Rambam Health Care Campus. ”Our findings are compelling and support the data from previous studies showing the limitations of traditional endoscopes. EndoChoice’s innovative Fuse technology dramatically improves the effectiveness of this life-saving procedure.”

At the same meeting, EndoChoice announced the FDA had cleared its 510(k) submission for the Fuse system. EndoChoice plans to expand the use of their Fuse system beyond the current pilot sites to more centers around the world this year.

“Since we announced the expansion of our company in January, our teams in Israel, Germany and the U.S. have been working diligently to develop and launch the revolutionary Fuse endoscopy system. This FDA milestone brings us yet another step closer to our mission of serving the GI professionals so they can give the best possible care to their patients,” said Mark Gilreath , Founder and CEO “EndoChoice”.

About EndoChoice
Based in Atlanta, EndoChoice is a platform-technology company that provides devices, diagnostics, infection control and imaging for specialists treating a wide range of gastrointestinal diseases. EndoChoice currently has over 2,000 customers and distribution in 34 countries worldwide, and has been recognized for three consecutive years as one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. by Inc. Magazine. To learn more, visit www.endochoice.com.

The post New Study Shows Full Spectrum Endoscopy Procedure Reduces The ‘Miss Rate’ of Adenomas During Colonoscopy appeared first on River Cities Capital Fund Management.

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Simbionix will make these materials available at no cost to the users of its MentorLearn system as part of the implementation of the ACS/APDS Surgical Skills Curriculum for Residents. MentorLearn is a web-based simulator curricula management system that provides the optimal solution for managing training and education needs for the Simbionix line of simulators.

The main strength of MentorLearn is the incorporation of didactic materials with skills training. The surgical videos and materials from Duke and other leading institutions are coupled with the complete procedures in the Simbionix simulators. This is a powerful combination for learners who can see an actual surgery, followed by conducting the same procedure in a simulated environment.

“The Simbionix collaboration with Duke University’s Department of Surgery will give surgeons-in-training around-the-world exposure to the techniques and case management practices from experienced surgeons to whom they wouldn’t routinely have had access,” said Paul Jensen, Simbionix General Manager, Education Division.

“By providing a link between simulated learning and real-world cases, we hope to enhance the value of our training curriculum to our residents,” said Philip Clark, Education Director at Duke University, Department of Surgery.

“The real case footage we are creating with Duke will improve resident’s cognitive understanding of surgical procedures,” said Jensen. “Coupling the insight of Duke’s surgeons with Simbionix’ hands-on simulators will improve training efficiency and allow trainees to reach proficiency sooner.”

The post Simbionix Announces License Agreement for Surgical Videos appeared first on River Cities Capital Fund Management.

Community college educators use Simbionix simulators to provide hands-on experience for their students in cardiovascular and peripheral vascular training. Some of the modules on the ANGIO Mentor include Coronary, CRM (Cardiac Rhythm Management), Renal, SFA, Iliac, and BTK (Below-the-Knee).

“Ultimately, the use of simulation in the Health Science programs at Valencia is critical to the student’s training, said Penny Conners, Dean of Allied Health, Valencia College. “In our cardiovascular technology program, with the aid of the Simbionix simulator, our students are able to replicate the exact procedures that they will be performing in the hospital setting. In this regard simulation helps the students to understand and put safety first for the patients so they can give the best care possible while working in their field.”

The ANGIO Mentor provides experience with basic/advanced guidewire and catheter skills, familiarity with endovascular procedures, cath lab team experience. Other skills include how to operate the C-arm, patient’s table, fluoroscopic screen, as well as how to read the hemodynamic monitoring and administer medications due to complicated treatment. The simulator offers hands-on training that is designed to enhance manual dexterity and improve appropriate instrument decision making. Students feel the high-end haptic that provide realistic simulation of guidewire, balloon, stent and other interventional devices.

“The ANGIO Mentor has been widely embraced by medical colleges in the education of surgical residents and fellows,” said Inbal Mazor, VP of Marketing for Simbionix. “Now, our portable haptic simulators and vast library of modules and cases have been embraced by community college CVT programs.”

Team training exercises build confidence and help students understand the requirements of all of medical team members. Patient safety is the primary focus of the vast curricula and validation studies have reinforced the value of simulators in professional development.

The post Valencia College Utilizes Sophisticated Simbionix Simulators in Their Cardiovascular Technology (CVT) Training Program appeared first on River Cities Capital Fund Management.

“Universal Analytics opens Google’s highly successful analytics tools to the inclusion of offline media sources to help businesses derive insights on customer activity,” said Irv Shapiro, CEO of Ifbyphone. “For those insights to be complete, you must include data from all your critical sources, and that includes phone calls. Ifbyphone’s enhanced call tracking application gives Universal Analytics users detailed, context-specific call data that they can include alongside their online and offline data to create rich profiles of customer activity.”

Google developed its Universal Analytics platform to provide marketers with a holistic view of consumer data from every source and device, including mobile, desktop, gaming devices, brick-and-mortar stores, and other platforms.

Ifbyphone’s call tracking application enables businesses to track inbound calls back to the originating marketing source, including online, offline, and mobile ads, paid and organic searches, social media platforms, and referring web sites. It also has advanced keyword-level tracking to tie calls back to the exact online or mobile search term the caller used to find a business’s web site. Ifbyphone’s call tracking provides rich and insightful data that businesses use to improve lead generation, optimize advertising spend, and prove marketing ROI.

The integration with Universal Analytics makes all of Ifbyphone’s call tracking data available for marketers to view and analyze in Google’s platform, including:

• Search Engine Reports: Understand how different search engines, search types (paid vs. organic), and search keywords generate inbound calls.
• Social Media Reports: Compare call volume and duration by visitors from different social media sources.
• Referring Web Site Reports: Learn which web sites driving inbound traffic also drive inbound phone calls.
• Caller Geography Reports: View a map of where inbound calls originate.
• Web Page Reports: Understand which web pages originate the most calls.
• Web Session Reports: Link call data to web sessions to track calls before and after meaningful web events, such as online purchases or web form downloads.
• Mobile App Reports: Track what events in trial and full versions of mobile apps generate inbound calls.

To view Ifbyphone’s call tracking integration with Universal Analytics, request a demo of the new enhancements.

About Ifbyphone

Ifbyphone, the leader in voice-based marketing automation (VBMA), manages, measures and automates voice conversations for businesses and organizations. Ifbyphone’s VBMA solutions capture and manage phone leads and information that often slip through the cracks of traditional marketing automation and CRM software solutions.

The Ifbyphone product suite is a set of software-as-a-service applications including ad tracking, lead distribution, hosted IVR (interactive voice response) and voice broadcasting. Organizations of all sizes and across multiple industries use Ifbyphone, including direct response, health care, real estate, home services and lead generation. For more information, visit www.ifbyphone.com.

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A lot of big data/Hadoop implementations are swimming against the currents of what recent history has taught about large scale computing, and the result is a significant amount of waste.

So says Univa President and CEO Gary Tyreman, who claims that established HPC tools are more than capable of driving value where big data workloads are concerned.

“At the highest levels, I see today a lot of people doing proof of concept and moving a point solution into production – but that requires a stand-alone environment, a silo, and I think that kind of grinds against the popular methods of the last 10 years,” hypothesized Tyreman.

“If you think about VMware teaching us how to share through consolidation and virtualization, and the last 2-4 years that we’ve seen with cloud teaching us how to distribute the workload and pick-up and create mobility. So today, building a silo or a stand-alone environment to do anything just doesn’t really ring true, right?”

Most enterprises, says Tyreman, don’t have the 24/7 capacity needs for Hadoop that a social media company requires, and that while the Facebooks and Twitters of the world push the Hadoop envelope, many enterprises will want to roll out Hadoop to solve particular pain points.

This is where Univa’s Grid Engine resource management software platform adds value for enterprises wading into the Hadoop pool, says Tyreman, who says that his company is seeing new revenues (approx. 6% of their total in 2012, claims Tyreman) by enabling their customers to run Hadoop in a shared infrastructure model, which Tyreman claims ultimately saves them significant dollars in infrastructure and support costs.

Grid Engine, for those that don’t know, gained fame in its early days as a resource manager that was widely used in academic HPC installations. Univa acquired the tool in January 2011, and say they’ve made over 500 updates to the workload scheduler since taking over the management of it. They now claim that the tool is primarily used by enterprise & commercial users, with 80% of their users coming from that direction.

One area the Univa chief says that they are seeing notable uptick in shared-architecture Hadoop implementations is life sciences. One such customer is healthcare modeling and analytics organization, Archimedes Inc., who has developed a sophisticated predictive model for the human physiology.

Using the Archimedes Model, simulations can be run to predict health outcomes for patients or populations using an array of clinically relevant variables against a broad data set. The model is able to calculate effects of clinical interventions, including such factors as biological outcomes, health outcomes, utilization, quality of life, and financial costs. Using the tool, physicians can make adjustments, compare variable and use data-driven modeling to set priorities for patients.

This Archimedes Model runs on a dedicated cluster of approximately fifty multi-core, rack mounted servers using Univa’s Grid MP to manage the resources.  The company says that as they began to productize their offering, they started experiencing painful bottlenecks that impacted the cost-effectiveness of their solution.

“We had done a lot of work to speed up the simulator, so the bottleneck was aggregating and loading the data that came out of the simulator into the analysis tool,” says Katrina Montinola, VP of Engineering with Archimedes. “When the data comes out of the simulator, you have to aggregate it in different ways. There are about 100 biomarkers, outcomes, and treatments per patient that need to be aggregated for each trial arm and each subpopulation. A simple load would take many, many hours, so we quickly realized we needed a better solution.”

That solution was Hadoop running in a shared architecture with their current environment, says Tyreman. “They wanted to be able to support multiple simulations within minutes and so going to Hadoop, they could cut that time down,” he explains.

“Hadoop allowed them to reduce the time, and what Univa brought to the party is that we enabled them to put it into the same cluster that they already had, which meant that they could now share so that they didn’t have to buy a new set of hardware. And so they save implementation costs of about 50%, and then, of course, whatever the operational cost on that is up front.”

Tyreman says that he expects to see this trend towards Hadoop in a shared environment not only continue, but expand. “The companies that are managing the workflow at the top, like Cisco Tidal Software, BMC Control-M, CA AutoSys – I think those tools are going to be used to drive and kick off the processes, and if you look at the way that those systems are built, they’re also typically siloed,” explains Tyreman. “I think that as people continue to adopt virtualization and move into private cloud infrastructures, the next logical step is to create sharing – so whether you’re coming from Hadoop up, or you’re coming from the workflow management tools down, shared infrastructures are the future.”

That’s exactly what Univa already has, says Tyreman, who is also boasting the release of the latest update to the Univa Grid Engine (8.1.4), which Tyreman says has almost 50 new feature updates, including memory usage metrics and performance enhancements relevant to those using a shared infrastructure model.

Waxing philosophically, Tyreman gives us a parting shot: “I guess the philosophical view is the products that have been deployed in HPC are perfectly suited for big data workloads. Anyone who says that they’re not, in my opinion, doesn’t understand what they’re saying, to be very blunt. The proof – we have customers in production with Hadoop running inside a shared infrastructure, using a product that was built on the back of some of the largest clusters in the world.”

Related Items:

Univa Cuts Hadoop Costs for Archimedes

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The Head Health Initiative will include two Challenge topics:

• Challenge I: Methods for Diagnosis and Prognosis of Mild Traumatic Brain Injuries
• Challenge 2: The Mechanics of Injury: Innovative Approaches For Preventing And Identifying Brain Injuries.

In Challenge I, GE and the NFL will award up to $10M for two types of solutions: Algorithms and Analytical Tools, and Biomarkers and other technologies. The Head Health Challenge is being hosted in a branded challenge community on NineSights. To begin the submission process, visit www.NFLGEBrainChallenge.com.

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