Awarepoint’s New CEO Enacts Plans to Expand Wireless Health Business, Software Portfolio

It’s been a busy seven months since healthcare technology executive Jay Deady took over as the CEO at San Diego’s Awarepoint, which specializes in real time location systems (RTLS) technology for hospitals and other healthcare providers.

The company raised about $9 million from its venture investors with Deady’s arrival, and Awarepoint acquired a Charlotte, N.C. software developer, Patient Care Technology Systems, in April for an undisclosed amount. As part of that deal, Deady tells me he has been remaking Awarepoint’s workforce, first by reducing the company’s roster from 72 to 61 in January, and then by hiring new sales representatives and account managers. Awarepoint now has 102 employees, including those from Patient Care.

Awarepoint also has been raising what Deady says will be the company’s final round of venture capital, which he expects to close before August.

So how do the changes reflect the new CEO’s strategy?


Jay Deady


Deady says when he was considering the CEO’s job last fall, he thought Awarepoint had done a great job of developing its healthcare-focused technology. The company’s approach to real-time tracking combines a wireless sensor network (based on the ZigBee standard) with radio frequency identity (RFID) tags to actively track medical equipment, supplies, and people throughout a hospital. He says he also thought Awarepoint had acquired some great customers, including the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., the UC San Diego and UC San Francisco Medical Centers, and had contracts with Phoenix-based Banner Health and Oakland, CA-based Kaiser Foundation Hospitals.

Yet the company was still facing a fundamental challenge: After launching its technology in early 2008, Deady says Awarepoint had acquired about 8 to 9 percent of the RTLS market in the United States. But industry analysts estimate that the total RTLS penetration of the healthcare market amounts to only about 10 to 12 percent in North America, and just 5 percent internationally.

In other words, Awarepoint was having difficulty expanding its business—at least partly because the healthcare market has been slow to adopt wireless monitoring technologies in general.

Deady’s strategy was to use the Patient Care acquisition to broaden

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.