A Medical Device Daily

Cardinal Health (Dublin, Ohio) and Capsule (Andover, Massachusetts) reported an agreement that promotes connectivity between Cardinal Health ventilators and hospital information systems using Capsule connectivity solutions.

The agreement ensures that Cardinal Health's AVEA and VELA ventilators have the most current connectivity software and creates a foundation for all future Cardinal Health ventilation products to connect to any hospital information system.

"The connectivity between ventilators and information systems is vital to our customers," said Pete Goulding, director of marketing for conventional ventilation at Cardinal Health. "Capsule's DataCaptor serves as a bridge that translates the digital output from our ventilators into a format compatible with all hospital information systems."

Capsule's DataCaptor features one of the largest device interface libraries in the world supporting more than 370 different types of medical devices, including patient monitors, ventilators, and infusion pumps. It automatically converts the medical device data to HL7 or XML format and integrates it with any electronic medical record, clinical information system, or alarm and event management system to help improve clinical documentation, enhance workflow and save thousands of nursing hours.

In other agreements/contracts news:

• Active Implants (AIC; Memphis) said it has signed an exclusive agreement with Joint Replacement Instrumentation (JRI; London) to expand distribution of its polymer TriboFit Hip System in the UK.

JRI will market its flagship product, the Furlong H-A.C. hip stem, alongside AIC's TriboFit acetabular system, a soft-bearing articulation product. TriboFit employs a low-wear, medical-grade, polycarbonate-urethane buffer.

AIC and JRI are launching a post-approval collaborative market study in the UK with leading orthopedic surgeons.

Under this new arrangement, AIC has agreed to manufacture certain components of the TriboFit Hip System at the JRI facilities in Sheffield, UK.

• Premier Purchasing Partners (San Diego) reported that it signed new agreements for vascular closure devices with Abbott Laboratories (Abbott Park, Illinois) and Cardiva Medical (Mountain View, California).

Effective Nov. 1, the 36-month agreements are available to acute-care and continuum-of-care members of the Premier healthcare alliance.

• NxStage Medical (Lawrence, Massachusetts) said that its Medisystems Division has signed a long-term product supply agreement with Renal Advantage (RAI; Brentwood, Tennessee), the fourth-largest provider of dialysis services in the U.S.

NxStage will supply the Streamline airless blood tubing set as well as MasterGuard and other products to RAI's dialysis center network.