• HealthPartners Clinics (Bloomington, Minnesota) said it is using the online patient services feature of their electronic medical record to send information, updates and links to resources about the swine flu to patients. HealthPartners has more than 150,000 patients enrolled in Online Patient Services, a set of secure, web-based services allowing a patient to interact with their clinic, provider and medical records from a computer and give patients more control over their care.

• Informatics Corporation of America (ICA; Nashville, Tennessee) claims that its CareAlign solution is a key to identification of disease and to preparedness for future epidemics and pandemics. Whether deployed within a single delivery system or within a health information exchange, ICA says that CareAlign can extract data from clinical information systems within the healthcare setting, aggregating the information into a single view that enables searching and querying to identify key trends.

• W.L. Gore & Associates (Elkton, Maryland) said it has developed the GORE Adsorbent Filter, an integrated filtration solution simplifying manufacturing of medical devices without compromising product performance. The filter contains activated carbon media and Gore's expanded polytetrafluoroethylene membrane. The company says the filter delivers a combination of adsorption, high airflow, and liquid resistance.

• Additionally, Gore reported availability of a 31-mm diameter version of the Gore Excluder AAA endoprosthesis, a device providing physicians with an endovascular option to treat abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) in patients with aortic inner neck diameters up to 29 mm. Enhancements include a flat-top design that enables greater efficiency and a lengthening of the trunk from 7 cm to 8 cm for larger anatomies. The device, an endovascular graft/stent combination that seals off the aneurysm and creates a new path for blood flow is inserted through a small incision in the patient's leg using a catheter-based delivery technique. Once positioned in the diseased aorta, the device self-expands using radial force, with a pair of proximal anchors to help ensure excellent fixation

• Perceptive Informatics (Boston) said that it has developed a robust medical imaging methodology for Central Nervous System (CNS) clinical trials involving Alzheimer's disease. The method, based on measuring ventricular size, provides a new approach to monitor brain atrophy in Alzheimer's disease and potential treatment effects. The company says the advantages of this method include providing higher quality, reproducible, and regulatory compliant assessments with the potential to help clinical trial sponsors make better and faster development decisions about Alzheimer's treatments in development. To develop this method, the Perceptive Informatics team collected MRI scans from the ADNI database using Perceptive's medical imaging system and regulatory compliant processes.