Patient Safety Technologies Changes Name to SurgiCount Medical
Tuesday June 6, 10:00 am ET
Bill Adams Named CEO
Expects Soon to Sell All Non-Core Assets to Focus on Its Safety-Sponge Opportunity
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 6, 2006--Patient Safety Technologies, Inc. (AMEX:PST - News) announced today that it will merge with and adopt the name of its wholly owned subsidiary, SurgiCount Medical, Inc. Bill Adams, Chairman and CEO of the subsidiary, will be named Chief Executive Officer of the parent company and join the Board of Directors, succeeding Louis Glazer, M.D., who will remain Chairman of the Company and a consultant during the transition period. Additionally, Richard Bertran, President of the subsidiary, has been named President of the parent company, succeeding Lynne Silverstein, who will also remain a consultant to the Company during the transition. These changes are expected to become effective as soon as possible, as well as changing the trading symbol for SurgiCount Medical's common stock on the American Stock Exchange.
Bill Adams, who joined SurgiCount as a strategic consultant in February 2005, was named Chairman of the subsidiary in November 2005 and CEO in April 2006, previously was President of Health West Marketing, a medical marketing firm he founded in 1981. Richard Bertran, who was named President of the SurgiCount subsidiary in January 2006, has more than fifteen years of experience in surgical product and technology sales and marketing, most recently with Maxim Medical, a leader in the creation and packaging of custom surgical packs.
"In view of the exciting growth opportunity we see for SurgiCount Medical, we believe that these actions are the best way to deliver value for our investors. Bill Adams and Rick Bertran are achieving dramatic progress at SurgiCount, and their promotions are well-earned," Dr. Glazer said. "In March 2006 SurgiCount won FDA 510(k) clearance to market and sell its patented Safety-Sponge(TM) System to reduce or eliminate sponge counting errors and improve patient safety in the surgical environment, and we announced our first national distribution agreement, with Professional Hospital Supply, in April. Bill, Rick and their team are moving ahead aggressively to establish the Safety-Sponge System as the standard of care in the healthcare industry."
The Safety-Sponge System is an integrated turn-key program of thermally affixed, data matrix tagged surgical sponges, line-of-sight scanning technology, and documentation that offers surgeons and hospitals a solution to gossypiboma -- the term for surgical sponges accidentally left inside a human body after surgery. The Safety-Sponge System is the first computer-assisted program for counting sponges ever cleared by the FDA.
"Based on our estimates compiled from various medical and legal sources, gossypiboma occurs in about 3,000 to 5,000 surgical procedures each year in the United States alone, and results in liability settlements and other costs in excess of $750 million annually. Accordingly, the Safety-Sponge System represents an outstanding long-term growth opportunity for SurgiCount," Bill Adams said. "To maintain our focus on successfully executing our growth strategy for this business, the Board has decided to liquidate or spin-off over a period of time all of the Company's non-core assets. We will publicly announce additional information concerning the sale or spin-off of non-core assets as we develop the plan in detail."
