Pathology software solutions provider, CliniSys, has acquired MIPS, one of the largest and most successful suppliers of laboratory information management systems (LIMS) in mainland Europe.
MIPS dominates the market in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and has made inroads into the French, German and Spanish markets in the past three to four years.
CliniSys say the acquisition will roughly double the company’s workforce to about 230 covering around 400 sites around Europe.
MIPS has no installations of its flagship laboratory management system, GLIMS, in the UK, though there is a growing number of installations of a MIPS analyser data manager called Centralink which is distributed and implemented by Bayer to support its Advia product family. CliniSys will build on the MIPS infrastructure in mainland Europe to expand the small number of installations of its oncology product suite.
CliniSys has a small number of installations of its WinPath LIMS product in mainland Europe.
The acquisition comes hot on the heels of CliniSys’ purchase earlier this year of Torex’s laboratory system, LabCentre. CEO, Fiona Pearson said the eventual aim was to bring the three products together.
“We want to maximise the benefits. All three products have different strengths,” she explained.
She added that the laboratory market was changing rapidly.
"There’s growth in point of care testing in many different community settings. The market has been talking about this for many years but with the growing focus on delivering patient centric care for those with long term conditions, we are now starting to see rapid growth and change in this area."
In the NHS she said there was a change in the landscape in terms of outsourcing laboratory services to the private sector. In addition she said that with all the IT investment going into the NHS, there was a growing awareness of the possibilities presented by IT.
“I think again we’re starting to see growth of people using PDAs and other mobile technology,” she said.
There will be no redundancies in MIPS. Pearson said one of reasons for the LabCentre acquisition from Torex earlier this year was to bring its ‘very able, very qualified’ workforce into the company. She said that people who understand how labs work in great detail and also have the IT know-how to deploy systems were a scarce resource.