Two Basque companies launch a healthcare storage solution
The healthcare sector is marked on the roadmap of business opportunities for Basque companies and the sector is moving with great dynamism. The Biscayan company Cardiva and the Gipuzkoan company Raindance made official yesterday, Wednesday, their alliance to boost digitization and streamline the logistics of healthcare material in hospitals. After four years of collaboration, Cardiva, a marketer of medical devices, and Raindance, a developer of software and hardware for warehouse inventory management, announced the entry of the Biscayan company in the capital of the Gipuzkoan company.
The aim is to launch a global tool to speed up and simplify the distribution of healthcare material. The basis of the ambitious project is the system implemented in 15 hospitals, where both companies have set up a logistics management system for the material distributed by Cardiva.
The hospitals have tested the capabilities of the Agile process, designed by Raindance to suit the healthcare company’s stockage, and “they are asking for more,” said Cardiva’s Clinical Director, Unai Atristain. What they want is for the software to be extended to products from other medical distributors. Having spotted the opportunity, the two companies have strengthened their ties to take advantage of it. Raindance has carried out a capital increase and Cardiva has become a shareholder with a 5% stake, valued at 500,000 euros.
The company from Guipuzcoa is now part of the Cardiva group and both parties are committed to further integration, explained Gorka Gallardo, CEO of Raindance. The presentation of the operation took place at the Balenciaga Museum in Getaria, because the Biscayan company is one of its godmothers and at the same time to give value to the alliance of a company born in Bilbao, which operates throughout the State and has one of its main logistics centers in Lezama, with another that accumulates 50 years of history in the storage sector and that from Astigarraga has jumped on the train of industrial logistics digitization.
Together they designed Agile System, an ad hoc storage solution for Cardiva’s surgical products. Agile is based on radio frequency identification (RFID), which is one step ahead of bar code scanning. Simplistically, the shelves they place in hospitals are fitted with a receiver that sends any movement in real time to the cloud. When a healthcare worker removes a device for use in a surgical operation, the system records it without the need to read the barcode. It also checks the expiration or sterilization cycles. In this way, the hospital can make automatic replenishments and efficient purchases linked to the consumption of healthcare resources.
Both companies are broadening their horizons and, although there is no concrete forecast for an increase in turnover, the business is already receiving a boost. They expected to carry out 40 implementations next year and already have an accumulated demand of 15.
