A Medical Device Daily

Nipro (Osaka, Japan) has launched a cash tender offer to purchase all outstanding shares of Home Diagnostics (Ft. Lauderdale, Florida) pursuant to an agreement and plan of merger between the two companies dated Feb. 2 (Medical Device Daily, Feb. 4, 2010). Stockholders of Home Diagnostics will receive $11.50 a share in cash, or a total of about $215 million. Home Diagnostics will continue as the surviving corporation and, as a result of the merger, will become a subsidiary of Nipro.

The Home Diagnostics board has unanimously approved the merger agreement and recommended that stockholders tender their shares in the offer. The directors of Home Diagnostics have also entered into separate stockholder agreements with the Nipro under which each director has agreed to tender all of his Home Diagnostics shares pursuant to the tender offer. The directors held an aggregate of about 15.33% of the outstanding Home Diagnostics shares as of Feb. 2. In addition, Home Diagnostics has granted an option to the company to purchase additional shares from Home Diagnostics if after the exercise of the option Nipro would own enough shares to effect a short-form merger without a vote of the Home Diagnostics' stockholders.

In other dealmaking activity:

• Quality Systems (QSI; Irvine, California), a provider of healthcare information systems and connectivity solutions, said it has agreed to acquire Opus Healthcare Solutions (Austin, Texas). The acquisition complements and will be integrated with the assets of Sphere Health Systems (Laguna Hills, California), which were acquired in August, the company said. Both companies are developers of software and services for the inpatient market and will become part of NextGen Healthcare Information Systems (Irvine, California), a QSI subsidiary. The transactions are expected to be accretive in QSI's fiscal year 2011, ending March 31, 2011.

NextGen will focus on providing solutions to hospitals with 100 beds or less, a marketplace that has been historically underserved and is in desperate need of state-of-the-art systems.

Opus delivers Web-based clinical solutions to hospital systems and integrated health networks nationwide.

Sphere is an application software development and consulting firm. NextGen acquired the company's Spirit Enterprise product, which is a comprehensive hospital information system that includes applications for patient management, decision support, financial management and human resources.

• Healthcare Trust of America (Scottsdale, Arizona), a real estate investment trust, reported a purchase and sale agreement to acquire the roughly 101,400 square foot Triad Technology Center in Baltimore, Maryland for about $29,250,000. The closing of the acquisition is subject to the satisfaction of a number of conditions, the company noted.

The building, which is located on the Johns Hopkins University Bayview Medical Center Research campus, is 100% leased to the U.S. Government and primarily occupied by the National Institutes of Health. The Bayview campus is a 130-acre site that is home to the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. The building houses three NIH groups including the National Institute on Aging's Intramural Research Program, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Human Genome Research Institute.