A Medical Device Daily

Henry Schein (Melville, New York), a distributor of healthcare products and services to office-based practitioners, reported a new strategic partnership with Brain-Pad (Conshohocken, Pennsylvania).

The new five-year agreement calls for Henry Schein Dental to be the exclusive professional dental distributor in the U.S. and Canada for Brain-Pad's NatureZone one-touch UV/Ozone oral appliance sanitizer.

According to the company, the product is designed to “quickly, safely and effectively“ disinfect oral appliances including mouth guards, retainers, dentures, and night guards. Equipped with a unique, ultraviolet light and ozone ion technology, NatureZone kills 99.9% of germs and viruses that can lead to MRSA, Staph, and Strep bacteria on any oral appliance in less than three minutes, the company said.

Henry Schein will also sell Brain-Pad's line of protective and performance dual-arch athletic mouth guards to dental practitioners and laboratories on a non-exclusive basis.

“Mouth guards that provide critical protection for athletes and important oral health appliances such as retainers and dentures can pose a significant health risk due to the serious pathogens these appliances can harbor,“ said Tim Sullivan, president of Henry Schein Dental. “Henry Schein is proud to partner with Brain-Pad to ensure that this safe, easy-to-use, portable sanitizing product is available to all of our customers and their patients.“

In other agreements/contracts:

• Connexall (Sarasota, Florida), a developer of integrated communications software, reported a strategic partnership with Voalté (Sarasota, Florida), a developer of point-of-care communications software on the iPhone and other smartphone platforms.

The partnership will extend both companies' capacity to integrate multiple communication devices and clinical equipment while improving workflow and patient care in hospitals around the world, Connexall said. By leveraging Connexall's diverse range of integration solutions and Voalté's seamless integration of voice, alarms and text on mobile devices, healthcare organizations gain a more impressive range of communication solutions than ever before, according to the company.

• Genoptix (Carlsbad, California) said it would participate in Aetna's national provider network to offer specialized laboratory and comprehensive diagnostic services designed to optimize the care of patients suffering from hematomalignancies, or cancers of the blood and bone marrow, including leukemia and lymphoma.

As a result, physicians will have additional choices for in-network specialty lab services for Aetna members. Aetna members could also benefit from lower out-of-pocket costs for Genoptix's laboratory services since copays, deductibles and coinsurance will be based on their in-network benefit levels and established rates for Genoptix's laboratory services, the company noted. The three-year agreement with Aetna is effective April 1.

• Premier Purchasing Partners (Charlotte, North Carolina) said that Nellcor Puritan Bennett (Mansfield, Massachusetts) has been added to the Tracheostomy Tubes and Related Products category. The agreement is available to acute care and continuum of care members of the Premier healthcare alliance.

• PositiveID (Delray Beach, Florida) has entered into a partnership with FIS (Jacksonville, Florida), a provider of banking and payments technology, to launch the company's Health Link personal health record. The new Health Link, which is now live, will be interoperable with Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health, as well as numerous electronic medical records systems in use throughout the country.

• Gene Security Network (GSN; Redwood City, California) and Ferring Pharmaceuticals (Parsippany, New Jersey) have signed an agreement to conduct a clinical trial of GSN's advanced preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) technology, Parental Support. The 11-center U.S. trial is designed to evaluate if GSN's PGD technology helps increase in vitro fertilization (IVF) success rates when using single cell embryo testing for an abnormal number of chromosomes, a condition called aneuploidy. GSN's Parental Support technology is designed to help improve embryo selection during IVF procedures in order to increase the pregnancy rate following embryo transfer compared with IVF procedures without embryo PGD testing.

• TeleHealth Services (Omaha, Nebraska) reported an extended partnership with Alegent Health (Raleigh, North Carolina). Building upon an existing relationship, Alegent has chosen TeleHealth Services as its interactive patient education and entertainment partner in the health system's “Generation Patient“ enhancement initiative. TeleHealth Services is implementing an interactive education and entertainment solution in six Alegent Health facilities. The partnership also encompasses upgrading all patient rooms and guest areas with state-of-the-art healthcare and commercial grade LCD televisions, Curbell GenIV direct access pillow speakers and Lucasey mounts. Alegent Health Lakeside Hospital will also be deploying the system's first all digital, on-demand patient entertainment solution.

• Allscripts (Chicago) said that Mid-Michigan Physicians (Lansing, Michigan), a multi-specialty group, selected the Allscripts Electronic Health Record to provide 70 of their physicians and mid-level providers, located across seven locations.

• MedUnity (East Sandwich, Massachusetts), developer of a public nationwide health information exchange (HIE) and fax service for the secure delivery of electronic healthcare record information, reported its selection by Praxis Electronic Medical Records to be their exclusive provider of HIE and fax services for the forthcoming Praxis 5.

• Iris International (Chatsworth, California) has entered into a first-time three-year sales and service supply agreement with HealthTrust Purchasing Group (Brentwood, Tennessee), a national group purchasing organization. Under the terms of the agreement, which will be effective March 1, HealthTrust will supply the full line of Iris' automated instrumentation, including the iQ 200 Sprint, Elite and Select series of Automated Urine Microscopy Analyzers and urinalysis workstations, and all related consumables and service agreements.

• Trumpf Medical Systems (Charleston, South Carolina) was chosen for a new 36-month contract by Premier Purchasing Partners (Charlotte, North Carolina). The new agreement, effective Feb. 1, provides Premier's more than 2,300 member hospitals and 64,000 additional healthcare sites with access to contracts for Trumpf Surgical, critical care and trauma/emergency department products.

• CardioComm Solutions (Toronto) reported that business partner Meditel (Milan, Italy), a web-based telemedicine services provider, recently renewed a three-year contract for CardioComm's GlobalCardio 3-Lead event monitoring software to facilitate mobile ECG services. Meditel uses Global Cardio 3-Lead to record patient electrocardiograms (ECGs), create ECG reports and distribute those reports to the patient's physician.

• North Carolina's Piedmont Triad Research Park was the catalyst for a partnership to provide doctors with a postprandial hyperglycemia blood test that can be analyzed in the physician's office. Carolina Liquid Chemistries (Winston-Salem, North Carolina) will market the GlycoMark (New York and Winston-Salem) blood test as one of a complete range of diabetes assays for the BioLis 24i bench top chemistry analyzer.

• Lutheran Medical Center (Brooklyn, New York) and Masimo (Irvine, California), inventor of Pulse CO-Oximetry and Measure-Through Motion and Low Perfusion pulse oximetry, reported the installation of the Masimo Patient SafetyNet system, an advanced noninvasive remote monitoring and wireless clinician notification system designed to help hospitals avoid preventable patient deaths and injuries associated with failure to rescue events.