Varian acquires Impac and markets gating device

Varian Medical Systems, a manufacturer of integrated cancer therapy systems, will acquire Impac Medical Systems. Varian officials in Palo Alto, CA, see this acquisition as an important move for the company in the healthcare information systems field.

Impac is headquartered in Mountain View, CA. Its flagship product is the Multi-Access Oncology Management System. The company also supplies image management applications, including registration, scheduling, billing, and accounts receivable functions.

Impac has been growing at about 30% each year and the company is expecting sales of approximately $28 million for fiscal year 2000, which ends Sept. 29.

Impac President and CEO Joseph J. Jachinowski will continue in this role and will also become a corporate vice president of Varian Medical Systems.

In other Varian news, the company will begin marketing and distributing a new component to its existing real-time position management Respiratory Gating System. Respiratory gating is a technique for making cancer radiotherapy more accurate and effective by adjusting for tumor movements caused by breathing. The Varian system gates, or turns off, the radiation beam when a tumor in the chest or abdomen moves outside a prescribed target area.

The new component, called the CT Option, extends respiratory gating to the scanner so that movements recorded during imaging can be correlated with a system that controls Varian’s medical linear accelerators. The CT Option is being designed to work with several types of scanners from different manufacturers, including GE Medical Systems.