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Ascent Healthcare Solutions
History
Ascent Healthcare Solutions was created in December, 2005 through the merger of Alliance Medical Corporation, based in Phoenix, Arizona and Vanguard Medical Concepts, based in Lakeland, Florida. The company is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, with production facilities in both Lakeland, Florida and Phoenix, Arizona. Ascent employs approximately 800 highly-trained individuals in these two locations and throughout the United States.
Ascent Healthcare Solutions is a privately-held company with a customer base consisting of approximately 1,700 hospitals and surgery centers in the U.S., including most of the medical facilities recognized annually by U.S. News & World Report as the top hospitals in America. In 2007, we saved these facilities and their patients in excess of $100 million dollars in supply expenses and diverted 3.4 million pounds from community landfills (an estimated $1.6 million in waste savings).
The former Alliance Medical Corporation was formed in 1998, as the result of a merger of Applied Medical Technologies, based in Phoenix, and Operating Room Recovery and Instrument Services (ORRIS), based in Houston, Texas. Shortly after the merger, the newly formed Alliance Medical Corporation acquired Sterile Reprocessing Services, Inc. (SRS) of Houston, Texas, the first independent reprocessing company established in 1987.
SRS was formed in 1987 to meet the needs of hospitals that had been receiving re-sterilized suture from Ethicon, Inc., a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, when they opened but did not use their suture products. That year, the OEM decided to discontinue this service of offering to collect, re-package and re-sterilize the unused suture, a service they had been providing for close to 30 years. The founders of SRS began to make these collections, perform the re-packaging and re-sterilization, then provide the suture back to the hospital for a service fee that was a fraction of the original purchase price. This was the origination of commercial single-use medical device reprocessing.
In 2001, Alliance Medical Corporation completed the acquisition of another small reprocessor, Paragon Healthcare Corporation, based in Little Rock, Arkansas and operating out of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Paragon established itself as the leading reprocessor of electrophysiology catheters and was a niche provider in this market.
Vanguard Medical Concepts was formed in 1991 to reprocess the surgical kits and packs that had been opened in the Operating Room, but not used. In time, the business opportunity expanded to include a much broader array of devices. In 2002, Vanguard acquired Medical Instrument Technologies (MIT), which was based in Utah.
These businesses began, individually then collectively, in response to the needs of the American healthcare delivery system. Hospitals could not afford to discard medical devices and incur the expense of replacement merely because the device manufacturer changed their labeling to indicate "disposable" or "single-use."
As an industry leader that is committed to the safe reprocessing of appropriate single-use medical devices and a staunch supporter of industry oversight by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Ascent’s predecessor companies Alliance and Vanguard are founding members of the Association of Medical Device Reprocessors (AMDR).
