A Medical Device Daily

Health Net of Arizona (Phoenix) and Phoenix Children's Hospital (PCH) have renewed a two-year contract that will continue to provide Health Net members access to healthcare at PCH and its two new urgent care centers located in the East and Northwest Valley. The contract covers Health Net members with employer-sponsored and Individual and Family Plans. Beginning Dec. 1, 2009, members will have access to all of PCH's services, which include specialty and sub-specialty inpatient, outpatient, trauma and emergency care.

Carolyn Pace, Health Net's vice president of Provider Network Management, said, "We are thrilled to continue to offer our members access to Phoenix Children's Hospital's services and their team of highly skilled medical staff. PCH is one of the 10 largest children's hospitals in the nation, and we are excited about their expansion plans. The plans will allow the hospital to provide essential medical services to our community and quality care for years to come."

Health Net of Arizona offers a network of more than 6,800 primary care and specialized physicians as well as 64 hospitals.

In other agreements/contracts news

• Broadlane (Dallas) has partnered with OB10 (Atlanta) to offer a comprehensive electronic supply chain solution to its more than 1,000 acute care hospital clients in the U.S. Through the Broadlane-OB10 alliance, healthcare providers will be able to eliminate between 60% and 75% of the paper invoices they receive from suppliers and replace them with electronic invoice data that is automatically submitted directly into a provider's accounting system. Automating the majority of invoices that healthcare providers receive has numerous benefits including lowering operational costs, reducing exceptions, realizing prompt pay discounts, eliminating late payment penalties and decreasing paper archiving costs. Capturing a larger portion of a hospital's invoice data also allows greater visibility into off-contract savings opportunities. The decrease in paper invoices is one additional way Broadlane is helping healthcare providers "green" their supply chains.

• Milestone Scientific (Piscataway, New Jersey) has signed a non-exclusive supply and distribution agreement with Utah Medical Products, granting the company rights to market and sell Milestone's CompuMed computer-controlled injection system to its North American customer base. Kevin Cornwell, CEO of UTMD, said, "We believe the CompuMed system fits well with UTMD's focus to provide specialized, clinically effective solutions for women's healthcare, especially for the surgical management of [uterine] cervical disease." CompuMed is a patented computer-controlled injection system geared to the needs of the medical market and allows many medical procedures, now requiring IV sedation, to be performed with only local anesthesia due to dramatic pain reduction. Also, dosages of local anesthetic can often be significantly reduced, thus reducing side effects, accelerating recovery times, lowering costs and eliminating potential complications.

• China Sky One Medical (Harbin, China) has engaged Guangdong Mediacy Kind Medical Devices Industry Service (MDK) to serve as its exclusive sales agent for the company's AMI Diagnostic Kit and Human Urinary Albumin Elisa Kit in Southeast Asia. The distribution agreement has an initial trial period of three months. A more formal contract will be developed to define the annual sales guidelines. The AMI Diagnostic Kit is used to diagnose early acute myocardial infarction and the human urinary albumin Elisa Kit is used to diagnose early acute kidney disease. "We look forward to a successful collaboration with MDK on the sale of our AMI Diagnostic Kit and our Human Urinary Albumin Elisa Kit, both of which have huge market potential," said Yan-Qing Liu, chairman/CEO of China Sky One Medical. "Our international sales team has already built a good market foundation in some Southeast Asian countries. We believe that MDK's mature sales network for medical devices will make this a mutually beneficial agreement."

• Premier Purchasing Partners (Charlotte, North Carolina) reported new agreements for disinfection reprocessing have been awarded to Hygia Health Services (Birmingham, Alabama) and ReNu Medical (Everett, Washington). Effective Jan. 1, 2010, the agreements are available to acute care and continuum of care members of the Premier healthcare alliance.

• eClinicalWorks (Westborough, Massachusetts) said that Johnson Memorial Hospital (Franklin, Indiana) has selected the company's unified electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management (PM) solution to streamline practice operations for the hospital's employed physicians. Johnson Memorial will also use eClinicalWorks Enterprise Business Optimizer to enhance the physician's ability to access patient's medical records and eClinicalWorks Electronic Health eXchange to begin building a health records system that allows for broad access to other physicians and hospitals.

• MedQuist (Mt. Laurel, New Jersey) said that the radiology search tool from Primordial Design has been integrated with SpeechQ for Radiology, MedQuist's real-time speech recognition system. Radiologists now have a toolbar on their SpeechQ screen to enable on-demand, nearly instantaneous "Google-like" search of all patient reports at their site, eliminating the need to interrupt workflow to open other applications. The application can also be customized by the user to access archived reports from the PACS or RIS systems as well as third-party radiology reference material and web sites. The PACS and RIS systems are not affected since the Primordial search engine manages its own indexing. "During documentation, radiologists frequently want to consult information related to the work at hand, whether prior reports or reference data," said Chris Spring, vice president of Product Management at MedQuist. "With this integration, SpeechQ for Radiology puts that information immediately at the radiologist's desktop."