Varian Medical Systems Teams with Cogent Health Solutions to Offer Case Management Software for Cancer Survivorship
Equicare CS powers a proactive follow-up care program designed to help cancer survivors achieve a better post-treatment quality of life

PALO ALTO, Calif. — March 20, 2008 — Varian Medical Systems, Inc. (NYSE: VAR) today announced it is offering oncology treatment centers a way to provide cancer survivors proactive follow-up care to achieve a better post-treatment quality of life.  Varian is teaming with Cogent Health Solutions to offer Cogent's Equicare CS (cancer survivorship) case management software with Varian’s ARIA™ Oncology Information System for the management of cancer treatment centers.

 “Earlier this year, the American Cancer Society reported that cancer death rates in the United States have decreased by 18.4% among men and 10.5% among women since the early 1990s,” said Maureen Thompson, senior director of oncology information systems at Varian.  “Equicare CS is a unique solution for ensuring that patients who have joined the growing ranks of cancer survivors get the help they need to cope with the health issues that often follow successful cancer treatment.”

 Cancer survivors typically require follow-up care for late effects of treatment, secondary cancers, and quality of life issues.  They often require diagnostic testing, nutritional, and counseling services.  The Equicare case management system is a web-based, patient-centric tool that can help cancer survivors, their caregivers, and their healthcare providers achieve better clinical compliance and improved patient outcomes following treatment for cancer. 

“The program helps doctors generate a care plan based on best practices and established guidelines, and creates a dynamic link between all the key stakeholders - patients, caregivers, and physicians,” said Len Grenier, president and CEO of Cogent Health Solutions.  “It distributes essential information to the patient through a personalized portal on the Internet, empowering survivors to become more active in their ongoing recovery.   A survivorship program with Equicare CS will allow cancer centers to continue providing world-class care and manage outcomes for years after a patient’s initial treatment has concluded.”

“Varian technology for advanced radiation therapy has been instrumental in the fight against cancer, significantly prolonging hundreds of thousands of cancer patients’ lives over the years,” said Dow Wilson, president of Varian’s Oncology Systems business.  “This agreement to provide our customers with access to Equicare CS is part of our ongoing commitment to the quality of survivorship.”

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About Cogent Health Solutions
Cogent Health Solutions is a developer of case management solutions for global healthcare markets, with a focus on disease management for health care providers, patients and their families.  Cogent is focused on setting the new benchmark for patient management in cancer treatment facilities around the globe.

About Varian Medical Systems
Varian Medical Systems, Inc., of Palo Alto, California, is the world's leading manufacturer of medical devices and software for treating cancer and other medical conditions with radiotherapy, radiosurgery, proton therapy, and brachytherapy. The company supplies informatics software for managing comprehensive cancer clinics, radiotherapy centers and medical oncology practices. Varian is a premier supplier of tubes and digital detectors for X- ray imaging in medical, scientific, and industrial applications and also supplies X-ray imaging products for cargo screening and industrial inspection. Varian Medical Systems employs approximately 4,600 people who are located at manufacturing sites in North America and Europe and in its 60 sales and support offices around the world. For more information, visit http://www.varian.com/.

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February 22, 2008 - Cogent to Attend Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Meeting

The Annual HIMSS Conference and Exhibition is recognized as one of the world’s largest and most respected healthcare IT exhibitions. This year’s annual meeting, to be held February 24 – 28, in Orlando Florida, is expected to attract over 25,000 delegates from the United States and Europe.

Cogent’s COO and head of sales operations, Mark Thomson, has this to say about the upcoming meeting.

“HIMSS will provide us with an excellent opportunity to showcase Equicare CS to the healthcare IT community in the US. This conference marks the first time the company will meet with technical stakeholders from health providers within the US healthcare market.”

Equicare CS, the company’s lead product, is a web-based, patient-centric approach which enhances a care team’s ability to collaborate with the patient in an efficient and secure manner, post treatment. Health providers are tasked with finding a ‘survivorship solution’ for patients, which meets the current guidelines, as described within the recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report and one which is complimentary to existing IT infrastructure within a provider’s site.

Thomson adds, “Development of Equicare CS has been done in tandem with direct and on-going feedback from leading cancer treatment centers in the US. At the center of our development has been a focus on capturing and interpreting patient information in the most efficient manner, based on the IOM guidelines, while keeping a keen eye on effective integration with the health provider’s resident information systems.”

Company representatives will be present for the duration of the conference. Information on HIMSS and the annual meeting can be obtained at www.himss.org.

About HIMSS:

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is the healthcare industry's membership organization exclusively focused on providing global leadership for the optimal use of healthcare information technology (IT) and management systems for the betterment of healthcare. Founded in 1961 with offices in Chicago, Washington D.C., Brussels, and other locations across the United States and Europe, HIMSS represents more than 20,000 individual members and over 300 corporate members that collectively represent organizations employing millions of people. HIMSS frames and leads healthcare public policy and industry practices through its advocacy, educational and professional development initiatives designed to promote information and management systems’ contributions to ensuring quality patient care.

About Cogent Health Solutions:

Cogent is a developer of disease case management software, solutions, and services for health care providers, patients and patient families. Improved survivorship care is critical to managing outcomes of life threatening diseases like cancer.  The promise of more effective surveillance and ongoing structured evidence-based care, will provide for better patient outcomes, and healthcare system efficiency gains. This is the opportunity that fuels our drive to achieve. Cogent is focused on setting the new benchmark for patient management in cancer treatment facilities around the globe.

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BC Business, September 2007 Issue

Game Plan, by Tony Wanless

Signing the Stars
The Team you put together is as important as the product

Countless companies start up with a great idea but then languish because they haven’t put together a management team that knows how to attract the interest of financiers who provide fuel to help the company grow.

Despite a common belief among many of these start-ups, it’s not the whiz-bang product or the graphics-laden business plan that attracts capital. It’s a management team that has the experience and ability to execute on the company’s strategy to build a business.

Problem
One company that got it right is Cogent Health Solutions Inc., which was born in 2000 as Cogent Integrated Solutions NA Inc., a developer of software to manage files in the health and social-services sectors. It was a good idea at the time, and after it went public in 2003 it attracted a bit of angel investment, most notably from Len Grenier, co-founder of ALI Technologies Inc., which was sold in 2002 for $530 million to U.S. health-care giant McKesson Corp.

But Cogent couldn’t seem to find its comfort zone and struggled for several years. Its aim was to provide case-management services for U.S. and Canadian social-care operations. But many of those operations depended on grant money, and money wasn’t usually forthcoming for expensive stand-alone software. An added impediment was that the sales cycle for such software was extremely long.

Tough market to crack, and Cogent was having trouble making a case to potential customers. As a result, it wasn’t attracting growth funding. So Grenier, who had by 2005 become chair of the Cogent board, began to remake the company. Most of the nine staff was jettisoned, and Grenier and the board took half the company private and converted the public part into a silver-recycling operation.

Solution
The next step was a research process to find a niche and restart the company. Grenier found one as the U.S. health-care system began changing from a completely simple (and costly) medical treatment model to lower-cost health-care management. This new model created a growing demand for tracking cancer survivors’ post-treatment progress. Grenier realized Cogent had the software needed to do this tracking; it just had to apply it to a different field and in a different way. Cogent could, for example, operate as a Web-based repository of information and charge health-care providers to access the information.

All that was needed was some basic funding and a management team that could attract more while it developed the market. Last year that team was put into place. Grenier assembled a governing board that would make a venture capital company slaver. The board includes Don Rix, founder and chair of MDS Metro Laboratory Services; Greg Peet, former ALI Technologies CEO (he and Rix were both early investors); and Amos Michelson, founder of Creo Inc., which sold two years ago to Kodak for more than $900 million. Together the group had experience building companies that sold for more than $3 billion. “Once you have a core idea that’s attractive, things fall into place,” explains Grenier, now Cogent’s president and CEO.

He created a management team out of Alan Paige, an original Cogent co-founder, as controller; Peter van Bodegom, ALI co-founder and former PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP consultant as CFO; Malcolm Wright, previously VP of product management at SourceMedical Solutions Inc. as VP of product management; Mark Thomson, former CEO of MDX Medical Inc., as chief operating officer; and Microsoft .NET software development expert Rob Chartier as director of software development.

What wasn’t to like? This spring Cogent attracted $3 million in early-stage financing from Vancouver’s Yaletown Venture Partners Inc., a relatively large placement for Yaletown. Yaletown partner Hans Knapp, who had been involved with Cogent for years, became the board’s chair. Cogent now has 10 staff and Grenier expects to strike a deal this summer with its first customer, the largest health-care manager in the U.S.

 http://www.bcbusinessmagazine.com/bcb/business-sense/2007/09/01/signing-stars

 

 

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As follow-up to a successful pre-launch debut at the ASCO Annual Meeting in June of this year, Cogent will launch Equicare CS, its’ much anticipated Cancer Survivorship system, at the 49th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic and Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). This year’s meeting will be held October 28 – November 1, 2007 in Los Angeles.
ASTRO’s Annual Meeting is the premier scientific meeting in radiation oncology. Its purpose is to address the educational needs of radiation oncologists, physicists, biologists, nurses and other healthcare professionals involved in the field of radiation oncology, as well as oncologists working in related specialties. Over 11,000 delegates from around the globe are expected to attend this year’s annual meeting.

Cogent President & CEO, Len Grenier has this to say about the company’s imminent launch.

             “ASTRO’s Annual Meeting provides the ideal venue for the first phase of our commercial launch of Equicare CS. The delegates and attendees at this meeting represent our target audience and are the same individuals who have provided much of the input during our development phase. We believe Equicare CS will provide a vital and essential link for management of cancer patients post therapy.”

Equicare CS is a web-based, patient-centric approach which enhances a care team’s ability to collaborate with the patient in an efficient and secure manner. A dynamic link is created between all the stakeholders in a cancer survivor’s on-going recovery.  As cancer survival rates continue to rise, more and more emphasis will be placed on the on-going care of cancer survivors. Currently, there are over 13 million cancer survivors living in the United States. Nearly 1 million new survivors are added each year thanks to earlier detection and improved treatment methods.

 “Feedback from several prominent US cancer treatment facilities indicates a strong desire to integrate a cancer survivorship tool with existing oncology information systems,” states Grenier. “Healthcare providers see Equicare CS as a way to improve patient outcomes and retain patients during the critical stages of recovery.”

About ASTRO:

Founded in 1958, ASTRO’s mission is to advance the practice of radiation oncology by promoting excellence in patient care, providing opportunities for educational and professional development, promoting research and disseminating research results and representing radiation oncology in a rapidly evolving healthcare environment.

About Cogent Health Solutions:

Cogent is a developer of disease case management software, solutions, and services for health care providers, patients and patient families. Improved survivorship care is critical to managing outcomes of life threatening diseases like cancer.  The promise of more effective surveillance and ongoing structured evidence-based care, will provide for better patient outcomes, and healthcare system efficiency gains. This is the opportunity that fuels our drive to achieve. Cogent is focused on setting the new benchmark for patient management in cancer treatment facilities around the globe.

www.cogentHS.com

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Business in Vancouver August 21-27, 2007; issue 930

Cogent Ideas

One of the original founders of A.L.I. Technologies, Len Grenier is taking that company’s successes and applying them to his day job as CEO and president of Cogent Health Solutions
________________________________________

Mission: Develop Cogent Health Solutions startup into a successful commercial health-care industry contender

Assets: Lengthy experience in building technology companies

Yield: CEO and president of a health-care company with global marketplace potential in applying management software to improve the effectiveness of cancer treatments
________________________________________

By Curt Cherewayko

Len Grenier knows a thing or two about the complex business of developing technology companies.

As a founding member of Vancouver success story A.L.I. Technologies Inc. and the current CEO and president of startup Cogent Health Solutions, he has become familiar with the many stages of their development.

It was the lessons learned, mistakes made, and, ultimately, the successes that Grenier experienced at A.L.I. that are helping him guide Cogent through the adolescence of product development to final maturity with a marketable product.

Grenier was introduced to Cogent’s team in 2003 as a potential angel investor. He had recently left A.L.I. after it was scooped up by McKesson Corp. (NYSE:MCK), the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America, in a $526 million cash deal in 2002.

“When I started doing the angel investing, I had no intention of going back to work,” recalls the mustachioed Grenier.

Cogent, however, which is developing treatment management software for cancer survivors, had other plans for Grenier. He joined the company’s board of directors in 2004.

Two years later, in April 2006, the self-described “laser jock” from Edmonton suddenly found himself CEO and president of Cogent.

“I was the only board member without a day job that had any sort of health-care IT experience,” says Grenier.

Now, with Cogent, Grenier gets the big desk full of paperwork (albeit with a beautiful view of Burrard Inlet from Cogent’s Gastown office) while the technical experts work computers and software in the next room.

“I don’t get to play with the knobs and dials anymore,” Grenier says, recalling his time as A.L.I.’s chief technical officer.

Cogent’s software creates a link between cancer survivors – who often receive little assistance after chemotherapy, but must still continue with treatment routines – caregivers and physicians.

The software automates and updates treatment schedules as they progress through the different levels of treatment, and with an information database, patients can learn about their disease.

Backed by a $3 million round of venture financing from Yaletown Venture Partners and angel investors in May, the Cogent is working closely with the Hospital Corporation of America at its CJW Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia., which recently sent Cogent a letter of intent to become its first customer.

Curiously enough, the centre is where, in the early 1990s, A.L.I. first piloted its PACS technology, used to manage and archive medical imaging such as X-rays.

Many of the parallels between A.L.I. and Cogent are intentional: Grenier is taking the successes of A.L.I.’s business model and adopting them at Cogent.

“One of the things we did better at A.L.I. than most of our competitors was actually trying to find out what the customer wanted,” says Grenier.

“As opposed to the more traditional approach of picking up something in the back room and going and [saying], ‘Here it is, do you like it?’ ”

Grenier had just left Edmonton’s General Systems Research in 1985 to hang his shingle as an independent engineering consultant when he was introduced to other members of the team that would eventually found A.L.I.

His first major job after graduating with an electrical engineering degree from the University of Alberta was in GSR’s research lab.

But it was with A.L.I., working with the company’s original president Chris Hanna and CEO Greg Peet, who joined A.L.I. in 1993, that Grenier cut his business teeth.

“Most of the lessons that I’m applying at Cogent, I’ve learned watching how, first Chris, and later on Greg, ran the business,” Grenier said.

Peter van Bodegom, also a co-founder of A.L.I., joined Cogent as CFO in July.

“[Grenier’s] had the benefit of A.L.I. where he went from concept right to the ultimate sale,” van Bodegom. “So he’s seen the full life cycle of the business.”

Van Bodegom was A.L.I.’s vice-president of finance for its first seven years, before leaving in 1994 when the company went public.

And while the team at Cogent includes part of A.L.I.’s original lineup (as well as Peet, who is a board adviser at Cogent) and ultimately wants to mimic A.L.I.’s successes, they want to avoid some of its mistakes.

“Cogent is focused now very much on a marketplace with a customer and a very clear opportunity,” said van Bodegom.

“A.L.I. had a very clear opportunity, but we were just too early on in the marketplace.”•

cgc@biv.com

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