Industry News

This memorandum was sent to all Trident personnel to bring them up to date on the recent acquisition of the Perfusion Unit of Fresenius Medical Care, the world's largest dialysis company.

5-16-2007

Last evening one could almost hear a collective national sigh of despair and the words “oh brother, here we go again”. Fresenius Medical Care Extracorporeal Alliance (FMCEA) was acquired by a new start up venture capital group, Specialty Care Services Group (SCSG). All of Fresenius employees were sent an e-mail yesterday regarding this transaction. Coincidentally, yesterday May 15th was the Fresenius Medical Care annual meeting, but there was no announcement of this transaction to the Financial Community. It is apparent that Fresenius Medical Care wanted to keep this as low a profile as possible and for good reason. How many more times do the hospital clients and hard working perfusionists of this entity have to be involved with yet another multinational or start up corporation whose major emphasis is “not” providing perfusion care to their client hospitals?

Let’s take a look at the players:

The new CEO of the acquiring company is a man who has accomplished much and who has been very successful. Most recently, he was the driving force and CEO of Renal Care Group (now Fresenius Medical Care) The Renal Care Group was purchased by Fresenius in 2005, and Gary Brukardt joined Fresenius as a member of the Management Board. He was also Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of Fresenius Medical Care – North America, and served on the integration steering committee, which oversaw the integration of Renal Care Group’s operations into FMC. In addition he was responsible for strategic planning, which included FMCEA’s perfusion business, physician practice management and chronic kidney disease management (source: news release July 26th 2005, Healthcare Sales and Marketing Network News Feed).

The other gentlemen who are founders of SCSG, have had very distinguished healthcare careers, but particularly with Renal Care Group. Their Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, a nephrologist, serves as a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at UNC, Chapel Hill and is founder of IT Service Group (Electronic Health Record [EHR] software company).

When you look at the new SCSG website, you will notice that under Software Services, is a company called Health IT Services Group which is, it appears, in partnership with Fresenius Medical Care. The other company mentioned on the website, Specialty Care Pharmacy, specializes in renal services and is a specialty care pharmacy. And who is the largest renal care company in the world, you might ask? Another Fresenius connection perhaps.

Lastly, we come to a new entity which is called Hospital Clinical Services Group, declaring themselves the leading provider of contract perfusion and autotransfusion services. Their website is under construction but their link takes you directly to Fresenius Medical Care Extracorporeal Alliance.

What does this mean? It looks like another renal services company headed up by a group of accomplished business executives who have concluded an insider buyout or arrangement with Fresenius Medical Care to provide renal services to hospitals nationwide.

My guess is that SCSG will eventually spin off all or parts of the newly acquired perfusion business and concentrate in the renal sector of their new venture.

My heart goes out to all of those clinician friends of ours who are caught up in the continuing saga of being the stepchild of big business. I hope that this new company and this new journey will not be another trail of broken promises and dreams not fulfilled as has been the case in so many instances in the past.

You will probably be getting calls from your friends and associates who have been entangled once again in another corporate chess game. Console them, as best as you can. You know that we are always looking for new people and new opportunities for growth.

Trident is a good company. I think we are the only contract perfusion outsourcing company that has letters of references from our own people! We have a strict standard of excellence to which we all adhere. Our people are our greatest asset. In hard times we do not toss them out like dirty dish water. We take care of our folks. We have terrific benefits. We still give raises and all are eligible for performance bonuses. We believe in a patient focused care philosophy. We have been under the same ownership and management for the last 19 years and we are proud of the singular attention we pay to our employees, clients hospitals and to the entire perfusion community.

While I’m at it, I want to thank you for your collective efforts in helping us with Neptune.net , our proprietary data collection software, and as some of you know, we are very excited about offering you new resources for additional and specific assistance in your heart program, perioperative blood management and risk assessment/avoidance and training and education support for your surgeons, OR and hospital RN staff.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me via e-mail or call the office. Thank you for your continuing great work effort.