Cardinal Health Invests in Intralign

Intralign has announced that Cardinal Health, Inc. has made an investment to contribute to the expansion of intra-operative management solutions for hospitals. A portfolio company of Altaris Capital Partners, LLC and Heritage Group, Intralign offers surgical assistance in combination with analytics and process design services to help providers optimize quality and cost of major joint replacement and other surgeries.

“It’s a tremendous privilege for an industry leader like Cardinal Health to support our vision for implementing sustainable change management solutions within hospitals and health systems to improve the cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery, ” said Rick Ferreira, Intralign president and CEO, in the October 28, 2013 news release. “Today, Intralign’s services focus on the intra-operative space—where more than 40% of the cost of the total episode of care is incurred. We help hospitals and clinicians understand cost drivers and help them gain control of the process.”

The value of Intralign lies in the unique combination of in-surgery support and resource management with analytics and service line process optimization. Through its intra-operative clinical support services, Intralign makes high-quality Surgical First Assistants (SFAs) available in the operating room, eliminating the need for hospitals to have SFAs on staff, reducing procedure time, and ensuring efficient use of resources before, during and after surgery. The benefit of intra-operative support is enhanced by Intralign’s analytics services, which enable the hospital to utilize internal and external data to gain a comprehensive and action-oriented understanding of resources usage, treatment quality, etc. The company also offers intelligent care design support to help providers enhance the flow of people and activities in the delivery of major joint replacement, so that ideal efficiencies and quality goals are realized.

“It’s important to us at Cardinal Health that we support the innovation coming from companies like Intralign in order to give providers actionable information, allowing them to address clinical, business and financial challenges in this new era of healthcare, ” said Lisa Ashby, president of Medical Devices and Diagnostics at Cardinal Health.

Rick Ferreira told OTW, “Intralign is thrilled to welcome Cardinal Health as an investor. Awareness of the need to focus on efficiencies and throughput in the orthopedic space is growing explosively, and our hospital partners are excited about the value we bring, as investments like this help us grow our solutions to combine clinical and operational goals.”