Three acquisitions in recent months have added to Elsevier Health Sciences' online medical content resources for clinicians and pharmaceutical firms.
The buys have helped the publisher expand into new areas. They continue a 5-year-old initiative to substantially remake Philalphia-based Elsevier, whose reputation was built on such reference titles as Gray’s Anatomy, Nelson’s Pediatrics, Braunwald’s Heart Disease and Campbell’s Operative Orthopedics.
“Five years ago, that’s what we were known for, our cornerstone medical journals and books,” says Brian Nairn, CEO.
Since then, the company has developed or bought a host of Web-based products covering clinical practice, pharmaceuticals and medical education. Upgraded search engines, for instance, enable a physician to enter data—such as a 38-year-old, post-childbirth female with hypertension presenting with chest pain—and get a list of typical diagnoses.
“Physicians don’t want all the information you can give them; they want specific information to answer an immediate question,” Nairn says. Elsevier did the same with its educational books, reformatting content into chunks that can quickly be read online or on a CD-ROM.
The company’s three most recent acquisitions each took advantage of the publisher’s online capability, Nairn says. Its purchase of the Clinical Practice Model Resource Center from hospital information systems vendor Eclipsys Corp., Atlanta, substantially expanded Elsevier’s electronic offerings for nurses.
The resource center offers a database of clinical care guidelines for nurses based on specific patient data. The database provides a work list that walks a nurse through what to do and then helps them document the work.
More Change Coming
The company announced in May that Michael Hansen would succeed Nairn as CEO in June. Hansen most recently served as CEO of Harcourt Assessment Inc., a San Antonio-based publisher of testing materials.
The January purchase of predictive modeling software vendor MEDai Inc. enabled Elsevier to offer products that help improve outcomes for providers and health insurers. “We needed to evaluate performance against best practice standards,” Nairn explains. “We needed an analytics engine to identify variances from best practices.”
The software from Orlando, Fla.-based MEDai analyzes clinical and claims data to identify high-risk patients and target them for intervention services. The software also assists in forecasting health plan costs and evaluating patients over time. The acquisition significantly expanded Elsevier’s presence in the payer market, which had been limited to Medicare and Medicaid use of the Gold Standard drug database services.
Elsevier also hopes to eventually use MEDai’s artificial intelligence technology to assist providers grappling with pay-for-performance programs and Medicare’s decision to no longer pay for the costs of certain medical errors beginning in October.
MEDai, however, was not an information technology acquisition, Nairn insists. “We do not want to be a health information technology vendor. We strongly believe we need to be HIT-vendor agnostic.”
Elsevier’s March acquisition of Norwalk, Conn.-based Windhover Information Inc. gave it new ways to serve the life sciences market—particularly the drug development and investor communities.
Elsevier has long published pharmaceutical regulatory reports. Windhover offers information on business, licensing and acquisition activities in the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotechnology fields. Its Strategic Transactions Database, for instance, tracks alliances, financing, mergers and acquisitions in these market segments.
As Elsevier has remade itself, Nairn has learned a valuable lesson: “As you build products, customers want to help you build them.” So, the company has been visiting hospitals, asking what they need, and involving them early in the decision-making and developmental processes.
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