PROVIDENCE – Ximedica has fashioned together a new national med-tech powerhouse, marrying East Coast and West Coast innovation ecosystems, with the stunning news announced on Aug. 18 that it had purchased Bridge Design, a San Francisco-based design firm with a deep customer base in connected, or mHealth products.

The move positions Ximedica – a one-stop-shop for outsourced design of innovative medical technologies and products – to be able to capture a significant portion of the rapidly expanding mHealth market, as the industry sector transitions toward the need for FDA approval for regulated devices.

In 2014, venture funding for digital health companies surpassed $4.1 billion, a record amount, nearly the total of all three prior years combined.

And, the wearable technology market is projected to grow from $24.2 billion in 2015 to $74 billion in 2015, according ID Tech Ex Research.

There are currently more than 100,000 health-focused applications offered on the Google and Apple app stores, one of the fastest growing trends in mobile development.

For Ximedica, a full-service ISO 13485-certified and FDA-registered medtech development firm, the deal flow creates a strategic alliance that promises to expand market share.

As Hope Hopkins, director of communications at Ximedica, described it: “The market potential for mHealth, which I think of more as Connected Health, is growing at a rapid pace.” A quick search on Google, she suggested, would offer up some staggering projections for market growth.

The market, Hopkins continued, is being driven by population demographics, changes in the health care reimbursement landscape, and expressed needs of the potential consumers.

“It’s important to realize that mHealth is actually an ecosystem of many different elements. The regulations change,” she explained, in terms of applying meaningful innovation across the health care continuum – from preventive health to monitoring, treatment and diagnosis.

The design of mHealth for the latter part of that health care continuum, including treatment and diagnosis, Hopkins said, “is more apt to be FDA-regulated. In short, the new Bridge/Ximedica duo now fully allows us to design and develop for the full health continuum.”

Growth strategy
The purchase of Bridge Design is the latest in a string of strategic moves by Ximedica, the 30-year old firm created by two RISD graduates, since SV Life Sciences, a Boston-based private equity firm, announced on Nov. 5, 2014, that it had purchased a majority stake in the firm. [See link to ConvergenceRI story below.]

With SV Life Sciences’ support, Aidan Petrie, Ximedica’s co-founder and chief innovation officer, had told ConvergenceRI, the expectation was to be able double the company’s size in two to three years.

“Our intent is to grow the hub here in Rhode Island, to grow the mother ship in Providence as much as we can,” Petrie had said when the SV Life Sciences purchase was first announced.

Since then, Ximedica’s strategic moves have included ramping up a new platform called XiLab, and establishing an entire new division, focused on Interaction Design. [See link to ConvergenceRI story below.]

Petrie predicted that in three years, the Interaction Design team at Ximedica would grow to at least 16 members, led by Jeff McCloud, the division’s new director.

McCloud held up his smart phone and told ConvergenceRI: “This is no longer a device of technology; it’s part of my life. It’s my social network. I take it with me everywhere. [I do my banking on it.] Why shouldn’t it be the way I interact with my health? It’s a disruptive technology. The critical thing is: I have it on my person.”


Sharing the same DNA
Aidan Petrie, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Ximedica, called the purchase of Bridge Design as the setting a new performance bar for innovation and design of medical technologies.

“This is about two organizations who share the same innovative DNA locking arms and setting a new bar for the design and development of medical technologies,” Petrie said in a news release announcing the purchase.

“By joining forces with Ximedica, we will be able to respond to an increasing demand from our client base for a more comprehensive offering,” said Bill Evans, president and founder of Bridge Design, in the news release that announced the deal. “We believe this will resonate deeply as major growth areas like mHealth build strength.”

Hopkins predicted there will little difficulty in the process of marrying together the East Coast and West Coast cultures.

“I don’t predict much difficulty in marring cultures,” Hopkins told ConvergenceRI. “a large reason we were drawn to this acquisition was due our commonalities: British accents, culture, and a focus on medical [products and devices].”

Strong evidence
The news of Ximedica’s deal to purchase Bridge Design hit about the same time that new details have emerged about the $1.3 million study that the Brookings Institute will be conducting about the future strategic opportunities to grow Rhode Island’s economy.

The money to pay for the study was largely donated by The Rhode Island Foundation along with a number of other private donors. But the study will be coordinated by the state under the direction of Stefan Pryor, the head of the CommerceRI Corporation.

As a result, the Brookings study exists in a gray area between the public and private sector, as Ted Nesi reported last week. The $1.3 million is being privately financed without taxpayer dollars, and Mark Muro, vice president at Brookings, claimed that the study was independent from political leaders.

However, Muro acknowledged that his team would be working closely with Raimondo and Pryor. “They’ll be the first stakeholder among many,” Muro told Nesi.

Equally fascinating was Muro’s description that Brookings’ central focus in the Rhode Island study would be on advanced industries that rely on science and technology, with plans to take a “a somewhat cold-eyed view” of the actual capabilities and potential research departments at local universities and colleges, according to Nesi’s interview.

“Clearly a central question here is, what capabilities really exist?” Muro told Nesi. “You have on paper a very attractive array of science entities, so we’re really trying to get a handle on what is going on, what they are good at, how they can really feed into a meaningful strategy.”

“These are testable propositions,” Muro continued. “I don’t mean that in a snarky way. It’s simply that there are data sets you can get, there are rankings you could get,” to determine the actual strength of the state’s research base.”

ConvergenceRI doesn’t mean to suggest, in a snarky way, to borrow Muro’s phrase, that Brookings and CommerceRI may be missing the boat in their approach. Beyond the data sets and the rankings, the team from Brookings may want to include as part of its analysis the success of Ximedica, the equity investment by SV Life Sciences, and the purchase of Bridge Design, and the focus on mHealth.

And, it could also plan a visit to IlluminOss and to Epivax and to the Slater Technology Fund to get grounded in the facts about Rhode Island’s emerging biomedical sector.