Awarepoint Raises $9M, Names New CEO to Crack Hospital Market for Real-Time Tracking

This is “Day 3” on the job for Jay Deady, who was named as the new president and CEO today at San Diego-based Awarepoint, which uses wireless mesh networking and RFID technology to track just about anything that moves inside a hospital, clinic, or medical center.

I figured that’s plenty of time for the new Awarepoint CEO to articulate his strategy, and Deady, believe it or not, was actually willing to discuss at least some of his thinking. Deady also says the seven-year-old startup recently raised $9 million in a combination of equity and debt, although it’s being reported incorrectly as almost $3.3 million, based on a Form D regulatory filing that reflects only part of the overall deal.

He adds that all of the company’s existing investors participated in the equity part of the deal, which represents new money since Awarepoint raised $10 million in March.

Deady was previously the Atlanta-based executive vice president of client solutions for Eclipsys (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MDRX]]), a health IT technology provider now known as Allscripts after merging with Allscripts Misys just three months ago. Deadywas previously a senior vice president at McKesson Provider Technologies, another health IT company based in nearby Alpharetta, GA. Deady says he also worked at Kansas City-based Cerner, and that his experience and contacts in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast regions should complement the inroads that Awarepoint already has at hospitals on the West Coast.

Awarepoint uses Zigbee-based devices that simply plug into electrical outlets to create a wireless mesh sensor network that encompasses an entire hospital or medical center. The network can track the location of patients, healthcare equipment, medical devices, and anything else with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag.

At Eclipsys, Deady led

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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.