Charlotte-based Premier Inc., which works with healthcare clients to improve purchasing and internal performance, has been on an acquisition hunt in recent months. And Raleigh-based Aperek is the latest at a price of $48.5 million in cash.

There may be more deals coming, too. 

Premier’s CEO explained her thinking in making the deal in a conference call with analysts on Tuesday. Premier (Nasdaq: PINC) went public in an $874 million IPO last October.

After noting some other recent deals, CEO Susan DeVore disclosed the Aperek buy. She described the decision to purchase the software-as-aservice supply chain solutions firm as a “buy versus a build decision.”

“With that further diversification in line today we announced our agreement to acquire Aperek formerly Mediclick, a SaaS-based Supply Chain work flow and analytics company for $48.5 million in cash,” DeVore said in the call.

“Aperek is a provider of leading healthcare Supply Chain solutions and will be instrumental in helping us further automate all of the Supply Chain management processes, is the critical element to our longer term, all-in technology, data analytics and services model. This is a buy versus a build decision for us it will get us where we need to go more quickly and cost efficiently.”

The Aperek deal follows recent additions of TheraDoc, SymmedRx and Memdata. 

“In early August, we agreed to acquire TheraDoc, a market-leading provider of clinical surveillance software. This acquisition increases our scale and access across healthcare providers and brings together two leading companies with similar vision and strong capabilities in data analytics and real time electronic clinical surveillance,” DeVore explained. “Looking forward, our pipeline of potential acquisitions remains active and we have a dedicated team continuing to evaluate a number of opportunities in growth areas that we’ve identified.”

Asked about the acquisitions, DeVore said offerings from the groups would be integrated into Premier’s growing product suite.

“[A]ll of them were very strategically important. We do have the same philosophy which is what we are trying to do is integrate these pieces and they are not standalone if you will and so for each one there is a part of the overall vision that we are putting together,” she said.

“So when we did SymmedRx it was because a big challenge for health system existing physician preference, likewise for Memdata.

“When we acquired Aperek the logic there is underlying infrastructure for supply chain workflow which is critical to the all-in supply chain technology platform.

“When you think about TheraDoc, TheraDoc was number-one market player in safety. The combination of their capabilities and ours and the eventual best-in-breed sort of, of both in an integrated way plus the fact that we got 400 new customers that we do not interact with at all, so it’s an integration strategy, it’s a growth strategy and Meddius was more of an internally strategically important acquisition that allowed us to have a data acquisition engine for this data that we want to exit on this consolidated integrated platform. So I know that was a lot of answers to the question. But it’s all in keeping with this overall strategy of integrated data on a platform solving all of the cost quality safety and population heath needs of our membership, but they do it in different ways.”

The transcript was provided by financial news site SeekingAlpha.

The full transcript can be read online.

 

http://seekingalpha.com/article/2453145-premier-inc-pinc-q4-2014-results-earnings-call-transcript?find=aperek&all=false