PeriGen Announces $6.4 Million in Funding and Strong Market Momentum for PeriCALM Perinatal Solutions in First Quarter of 2013

PRINCETON, N.J., April 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuing its strong momentum from better than anticipated earnings in 2012, PeriGen, the global leader in applying real-time clinical decision support to perinatal systems, announced that it received significant industry recognition, raised $6.4 million in funding, achieved record bookings and expanded its senior management team in the first quarter of 2013.

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"Our first quarter results illustrate the industry's recognition that PeriGen solutions are best positioned to enable superior perinatal care and reduce hospital liability risk," said Matthew Sappern, CEO of PeriGen. "Hospitals increasingly select us as their preferred perinatal vendor because our solutions provide so much more clinically relevant and actionable information than other solutions on the market."

Labor and delivery is a high-risk service line for hospitals because obstetric injuries to mothers and newborns result in some of the largest malpractice awards. PeriGen's suite of fetal surveillance solutions targets the most common underlying causes of preventable medical errors to help clinicians improve clinical outcomes. Equipped with evidence-based methods, these solutions deliver real-time decision support in a timely and visually intuitive way to nurses and physicians throughout the OB continuum.

In the first quarter of 2013, PeriGen was recognized for its innovative contributions to perinatal care when experts from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) validated the company's electronic fetal monitoring (EFM) pattern recognition software, PeriCALM Patterns™. With very high levels of agreement between the NIH clinical experts and the tracing analysis by PeriCALM Patterns, they concluded that "the software can be used to efficiently evaluate stored fetal heart rate data retrospectively, as well as to screen in real time when an expert is not continuously evaluating the fetal heart rate." This finding was published in January's American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and was the subject of a commentary by The New York Times reporter Steve Lohr in February.

The company also expanded its clinical leadership in Q1 by appointing Thomas J. Garite, M.D., as Chief Clinical Officer. Dr. Garite is a nationally-respected obstetrics, gynecology and maternal-fetal medicine specialist and editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

On the strength of these developments and better than anticipated earnings in 2012, PeriGen secured $6.4 million from private investors for further product development and marketing initiatives. At the same time, PeriGen expanded its market reach through a distribution agreement with leading international system integrator Helix Health Solutions, based in Dubai. In addition, a record number of hospitals ─ including Griffin Hospital in Derby, Conn., and Taylor Regional Hospital in Hawkinsville, Ga. ─ activated PeriCALM in their labor and delivery departments.

These notable achievements follow on the heels of PeriGen's most successful year. The company increased revenue by 11 percent and signed a record number of new hospital and health system clients in 2012. Last year's highlights included:

• The company's patent portfolio increased by five, bringing the total of issued and awarded patents to 23.
• It began working with Epic to bring a number of shared clients live on its PeriCALM platform interfaced to Epic's EHR. The company introduced PeriCALM Plus™, the only electronic fetal surveillance system on the market that offers real-time tracing analysis and efficient overviews of significant trends.
• In August, a study tracking the application of PeriCALM Shoulder Screen™ over a four-year period was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. This is the first published report of a method that was associated with both a reduction in shoulder dystocia rates and stable primary cesarean rates. During the study period, the rate of shoulder dystocia fell by 56.8 percent with no change in the primary cesarean delivery rate. This rare but serious complication of childbirth can result in permanent handicaps such as Erb's palsy.
• PeriGen and TransRe, a leading healthcare professional liability reinsurer, formed a strategic alliance to promote PeriCALM Shoulder Screen to practicing obstetricians.

Sappern stated, "The trend of vertical integration in healthcare, where organizations own physicians, hospitals and payers, greatly benefits from tools such as PeriCALM that deliver more relevant and usable information in real time to help clinicians make knowledge-driven decisions. With our next-generation technology and financial strength, we are well positioned to accelerate growth and revenue in 2013 and beyond."

About PeriGen, Inc.

PeriGen, Inc., is an innovative provider of fetal surveillance systems employing patented, pattern-recognition and obstetrics technologies that empower perinatal clinicians to make confident, real-time decisions about the mothers and babies in their care. PeriGen's customer-centric team of clinicians and technologists builds the most advanced systems available to augment obstetric decision-making and improve communications among the clinical team at the point of care, while supporting data flow between healthcare IT systems.

PeriGen's unique fetal surveillance products provide dynamic visual cues that direct clinicians to the most essential patient information displayed on the screen. Unlike legacy fetal monitoring devices and software from non-specialist companies, PeriGen Visual Cueing™ provides an instant view of the mother's and baby's current status and trends over time to avoid errors, increasing patient safety and reducing risk for clinicians and hospitals. For more information, please visit us at www.PeriGen.com.

Media Contact:
Angela Jenkins
Amendola Communications for PeriGen
720.859.6930
[email protected]

SOURCE PeriGen, Inc.