A Medical Device Daily

Merge Healthcare (Milwaukee) reported that InSite One (Wallingford, Connecticut), a service provider of medical data archiving, storage, and disaster-recovery solutions, has expanded its contract with Merge to provide a universal viewing solution for its InDex archiving services.

"We are excited about joining forces to bring new InDex solutions into additional verticals within the healthcare market," said Jim Champagne, president of InSite. "We have shown our combined solution to several HIE organizations and enterprise clients, and our first implementation is already underway."

"Our continued innovation in imaging software allows us to change the healthcare information distribution paradigm by the intuitive inclusion of images and radiology reports. We are thrilled to work with InSite One, a long-time partner, to bring this innovative solution to the market," said Antonia Wells, president of Merge's OEM division.

The new zero-footprint technology provides clinicians and CIOs with a solution that overcomes the challenges associated with the distribution of images over a wide area network. Image distribution solutions typically involve expensive hardware, high IT support/deployment costs, platform compatibility issues and high bandwidth requirements. Using InDex Web, with integrated Cedara WebAccess technology from Merge, physicians are able to obtain patient information via a web browser at the point-of-care through their laptops, tablets and smart phones such as Apple iPhone and Blackberry Bold, the company said.

"Medical images are a critical component of a patient's health record, because the ability to access a patient's imaging history and understand diagnostic rationale helps clinicians minimize duplicative scans and reduce a patient's exposure to radiation," said Mitch Goldburgh, Senior VP of marketing and business development at InSite. "However, the sharing of medical images and reports across an HIE has traditionally been considered cost-prohibitive. Leveraging Merge's expertise in imaging and connectivity, InSite One is bringing to market a solution that makes such sharing of information both financially and technically feasible."

Merge and InSite will be conducting a panel discussion on "Getting Radiology Info into HIE" at the Radiological Society of North America (Oakbrook, Illinois) meeting in Chicago this week.

In other agreements/contracts:

• CardioGenics (Mississauga, Ontario) reported that Merck Chimie (Cedex, France) is progressing to the next phase of the commercialization of CardioGenics' silver coated paramagnetic beads.

Per the agreement with Merck that was executed earlier this year, CardioGenics supplied Merck with its silver coated paramagnetic beads for polymer encapsulation by Merck using its polymer process. Merck has informed CardioGenics that its encapsulation of the beads was successful and that they will start shipping the encapsulated beads to CardioGenics for testing in December. CardioGenics intends to meet with Merck in early 2010 to examine the test results against Merck's predetermined quality specifications for the encapsulated beads. Merck has also informed CardioGenics that, once the predetermined quality specifications for the encapsulated beads are met, it will scale-up its production of the final encapsulated beads to commercial lots, in preparation for product launch. Merck will be responsible for all marketing and commercialization costs, with CardioGenics receiving 30% of the proceeds of sales.

• Compressus (Washington) said it has recently completed three customer agreements for the implementation of enterprise-wide interoperability solutions, integrating digital imaging and data management systems. Involving 23 hospitals and imaging centers around the country, the multiple implementations will include some 100 radiologists and a combined diagnostic image volume of more than 2 million, when all phases of implementation are complete, the company said.

The sites include Texas Radiology Associates (TRA; Plano, Texas), Meridian Imaging (MIPA; Meridian, Mississippi), and Southwest Imaging and Interventional Specialists (SIIS; Dallas).

TRA, a 70 member radiology group, recently acquired a new hospital contract with a light study load that requires an onsite radiologist, MEDxConnect will enable the radiologist to be as productive as those physicians staffing facilities with significant study volumes. TRA contacted Compressus to connect sites on the network for workload balancing across the TRA private network and to make subspecialty reads available in an efficient manner.

MIPA is a private clinical radiology practice, which consists of 12 facilities, five disparate PACS archives, five disparate RIS systems and multiple dictation platforms. MIPA selected Compressus for the functional capability of MEDxConnect to aggregate all of the disparate archives into one common worklist, display relevant priors, and historical documents associated to specific studies.

SIIS is a 22 member radiology group that has chosen MEDxConnect to provide a more efficient use of the group's subspecialty capabilities across the SIIS enterprise, create an electronic order from contracted facilities that are without a RIS and streamline the disparate dictation platforms.