A Medical Device Daily

Extension, Inc. (Fort Wayne, Indiana) and AeroScout (Redwood City, California) said they have collaborated to develop integrated solutions that combine Extension's VoIP alerting with AeroScout's Healthcare RTLS (real-time location system).

AeroScout says its core healthcare offerings provide real-time location, status and condition information about assets, patients and staff. Extension says it provides an appliance-based software application that aggregates HL7 and web-services data from all HIS and EMR systems, delivers relevant information to mobile devices such as Cisco IP Phones and cell phones and allows recipients to send automated responses via their device. Together, the two companies say they can provide a more enriched, clinically relevant tracking and alerting solution integrated with the Cisco Unified Communications platform so that healthcare organizations can improve clinical and operational workflows. Both companies provide solutions that leverage healthcare organizations' existing Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Extension and AeroScout say they can now offer the following features and functionality to healthcare customers:

• HL7-enabled AeroScout alerts,

• advanced AeroScout alerting via Text-to-Speech phone calls,

• alert management capabilities such as acceptance and escalation, and

• location-enabled EXTENSION alerts.

"Adding Extension enhanced messaging to our alerts delivers even more value to customers from our Temperature Monitoring, Asset Tracking and Patient Flow solutions," said Scott Phillips, AeroScout's director of product architecture. "We can now offer Text-to-Speech, priority alerts and queuing to our healthcare customers. Working with Extension, we are able to help doctors, nurses and other hospital staff increase efficiencies and minimize the time wasted on coordination."

In other agreements/contracts news, Premier Purchasing Partners (Charlotte, North Carolina) reported new agreements for cribs, bassinets and youth beds have been awarded to Homewood Health Care Products (Dublin, Ohio), a veteran owned business enterprise; and NK Medical Products (Clarence, New York), a small business enterprise.

Effective April 1, the agreements are available to acute care and continuum of care members of the Premier healthcare alliance.