A Medical Device Daily

Health-Robotics (Bozen, Italy) reported that it has signed an exclusive five-year strategic partnership with Grifols (Barcelona, Spain), a pharmacy automation provider in Spain, Portugal and South America.

Grifols safely, accurately and cost-effectively automates the preparation of non-hazardous IV Admixtures with Health Robotics' i.v.STATION Robot.

As part of this strategic partnership, Grifols will take delivery of 120 i.v.STATION Robots between now and December 2014 for deployment in Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Surinam, Guyana, Belize and French Guyana.

"We are very pleased to have been chosen by Health Robotics as their exclusive i.v.STATION partner in our core markets," said Ramon Riera, executive member of the board of directors and vice president of marketing and sales, Grifols. "i.v.STATION represents an ideal complement to other oral medication automation products such as BlisPack, Pyxis' MedStation, Kardex Carroussels, and to our systems for IV preparation as Misterium clean rooms or the Grifill sterile compounding device sector, in which we hold a commanding lead in Spain, Portugal and South America with over 200 hospitals utilizing our Pharmacy Automation technology."

Constructed around a scalable, distributed architecture, i.v.STATION offers final container flexibility, life-critical patient safety and robotic precision and performance. i.v.STATION may be deployed in a variety of locations, including central and satellite pharmacies and direct patient care areas, due to its self-contained form, ISO Class 5 environment, and small foot print.

Health-Robotics said pharmacies may, for the first time, choose a robotic configuration that suits their needs, rather than being forced into an alternative of "one-size-fits-all, million-dollar-plus" robots designed 10 years ago.

The company said that, whether a pharmacy chooses a single or multiple i.v.STATION configurations, it will benefit from fully automated compounding while producing its ready-to-administer IV doses in a variety of syringe, bag, vial, and tamper-evident caps from diverse medical suppliers.

In other agreements/contracts news:

• iMedicor (Nanuet, New York) said that it has entered into an agreement with Vitals, a provider of extensive, searchable physician databases. This partnership gives iMedicor the ability to access Vitals' database of more than 700,000 practicing physicians in the U.S. to streamline physicians' registration on the iMedicor portal.

"One of the most precious commodities in a physician's day is time," said Fred Zolla, CEO of iMedicor. "Through this partnership, Vitals' detailed database of physicians practicing in the U.S. will expedite physicians' registration on our portal. After logging on, and authenticating their identity, doctors will be able to access their own, pre-populated curriculum vitae and begin using the portal immediately to take advantage of all the benefits it has to offer."

iMedicor is a free, HIPAA compliant health information exchange portal, offering a proprietary technology solution that addresses the long-standing and widespread inability of disparate electronic medical records systems to communicate, collaborate and exchange medical records in a HIPAA compliant environment. iMedicor provides access to product-specific continuing medical education resources, and facilitates e-prescribing and ordering refills.

• eGistics (Dallas) reported that it has signed a multi-year contract with national claims and risk management provider Avizent (Columbus, Ohio) to deliver a hosted platform for the archive and retrieval of workers' compensation claims documents. Avizent expects the platform to further streamline its claims management process by utilizing this more efficient document storage and retrieval process, resulting in improved productivity, and increased customer satisfaction.