Company news

A proposal that would make it easier for Eli Lilly and Co. to be purchased in an unwanted takeover will be voted on again by shareholders at the company’s annual meeting. The effort to remove an 80-percent approval threshold for takeover bids against the wishes of Lilly’s board is on the agenda of the April 18 meeting. The proposal failed last year after receiving approval from 74 percent of shareholders owning Lilly stock. To pass, it needed the support of investors holding 80 percent of all of Lilly’s outstanding shares. The supermajority vote requirement, which has been in place for more than 25 years, applies not only to outright takeover bids, but also to measures used to achieve them, such as removing directors before their terms end or expanding the size of the board. If the proposal passes, it would require a bare majority of votes to approve such actions in the future.

A researcher at the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute Inc. has received a $420,000 grant to use computer technology to manage patients after they leave hospitals. Dr. Martin Chieng Were’s research focused on patients who are discharged from a hospital even when results from their medical tests are still pending. Poor communication and management of such patients leads to serious medical errors in the patients’ follow-up care, Were has shown. The grant is from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Arcadia Resources Inc. continued to shed money in its most recent quarter but took a smaller loss than it did in the same period of 2009. Indianapolis-based Arcadia lost $2.3 million, or 1 cent per share, on revenue of $26.2 million in its third fiscal quarter, which ended Dec. 31. That compares to a loss of $3.2 million, or 2 cents per share, on revenue of $25.7 million for the same quarter in 2009. In its pharmacy segment, Arcadia reported revenue of $5 million in the latest quarter, marking a 22.6-percent increase for its DailyMed medication-management system over the same period in 2009. Arcadia’s DailyMed service packages doses of prescriptions into individual packets, to make it easier for patients on numerous medications to stick to their regimens. DailyMed currently is offered in WellPoint-affiliated health plans in California, Kansas, South Carolina and Virginia.