A Medical Device Daily

Healthcare management consulting firm Beacon Partners (Weymouth, Massachusetts), has been chosen by Scott & White Healthcare (Temple, Texas) to assist in a $12 million enterprise revenue cycle project that will involve providing assistance with project management and application leadership for its GE Centricity implementation.

"We will help Scott & White achieve a successful implementation of GE Centricity by providing them with our hospital/physician revenue cycle experts along with experienced GE application leaders to assist them through this critical transition," said Ralph Fargnoli, Jr, president/CEO of Beacon Partners.

"We chose Beacon Partners for their depth of experience and scope of knowledge across large, integrated medical centers, and, in particular, their ability to blend optimal workflow into systems design and implementation," said Duncan Campbell, executive director, Revenue Cycle Operations at Scott & White Healthcare. "We look forward to partnering with them to develop a model platform within the industry that will promote efficient and seamless processes across the organization, and, most importantly, optimize the patient experience throughout the Scott & White system."

Beacon Partners' engagement with Scott & White Memorial Hospital and Clinic has just begun and the project is expected to last for 15 months.

In other agreements/contracts news:

• As part of a clinical initiative aimed at establishing more patient-centered care, Liberty Hospital (Liberty, Missouri), a 250-bed community hospital, has activated integrated clinical components of Eclipsys' (Atlanta) Sunrise Enterprise suite of solutions. As part of a rolling implementation strategy, Liberty Hospital chose to first transform its emergency department (ED) operations – typically the most daunting area of the hospital to install technology because of the critical need to quickly capture data to triage multiple patients simultaneously. Within six months, Liberty Hospital emergency physicians moved from paper and white boards to Eclipsys' computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system and electronic documentation and charting solutions to improve the speed and quality of placing both medication and non-medication patient orders.

• Siemens Hearing Instruments (Piscataway, New Jersey) reported its third annual partnership with Quota International's Sound Beginnings program. The alliance will be effective through September 2010. As part of the renewed partnership, Siemens is expanding the program to provide vouchers for 100 free hearing instruments to both children and young adults, age 23 years and under, who have been diagnosed with hearing loss. The vouchers this year will allow for the donation of Siemens Motion, Siemens Explorer and Siemens Cielo 2 hearing instruments.

• Biovista (Charlottesville, Virginia) signed a new collaboration agreement with the Thalassaemia International Federation (TIF; Athens, Greece) for the installation and support of its JAnaemia patient record management system. JAnaemia, which has been customized, in this case for beta thalassemia patients, will be initially installed at the New General and the Makarios hospitals in Nicosia, Cyprus. "The TIF is glad to have selected JAnaemia as the system that will help medical staff at our two hospitals, collect, manage and analyze patient records in a systematic way that will hopefully lead to better care for beta-thalassemia patients," said Androulla Eleftheriou, executive director of TIF. "Once the deployment at these two pilot hospitals is complete, we plan to invite other thalassemia organizations, both in Cyprus and abroad, to join."

• SensAble Technologies (Woburn, Massachusetts) and VITA (Bad Sackingen, Germany) reported that SensAble has integrated VITA's Physiodens and Vitapan digital tooth libraries into the SensAble Dental Lab System. SensAble's system is an integrated CAD/CAM solution to scan, design and fabricate a wide variety of dental restorations, including full-contour crowns and bridges, as well as metal and flexible partials.

These two digital libraries were created specifically for inclusion in SensAble's system by precisely scanning Vita's hand-crafted denture teeth. Dental lab technicians use the 3-D models of the teeth as a starting-point for digitally designing the perfect fitting restoration for a patient. By offering Vita's tooth libraries in digital form within SensAble's system, the two companies expand dental labs' choice and flexibility to deliver the most functional and esthetically pleasing restorations to their dentists – restorations created with digital speed, precision and efficiency.

• iMedicor (Nanuet, New York) said that it has entered into a Master Teaming Agreement with AxSys Healthcare (Paisley, UK). The Master Teaming Agreement enables iMedicor to market and deliver AxSys Excelicare solutions to its U.S. clients. It also licenses iMedicor as a prime contractor to share in recurring revenue derived from participating healthcare provider and patient portals, electronic health record Lite systems and electronic data interchange solutions. Going forward, iMedicor will combine its community-based, secure messaging platform with AxSys Excelicare's solutions to offer functionality that complies with the U.S. federally mandated inter-operability requirements, for the adoption of EHRs, and to ensure that participating physicians are eligible for ARRA funding.