A Medical Device Daily

LMS Medical Systems (Montreal), developer of the Calm patient safety software systems for obstetrical care, reported that it has entered into an agreement with AirStrip Technologies (San Antonio), which develops medical software applications for hand-held devices, to provide an interface between the Calm system and the AirStrip OB medical application.

AirStrip OB allows obstetricians to remotely and securely access virtual real-time and historical waveform and other critical data for both the mother and baby directly from the hospital's labor and delivery unit, utilizing only a cell phone connection. AirStrip OB is available for use on PDAs and "smart" phones and is in use in more than 45 U.S. hospitals and healthcare systems.

Trey Moore, chief technology officer of AirStrip, said, "Working together, AirStrip OB and the LMS Calm Suite will provide medical staff with a comprehensive package of tools aimed at improving patient care outcomes for mothers and their babies."

In other agreements/contracts news:

• HemCon Medical Technologies (Portland, Oregon) signed an agreement with Institute of Technology (IT/Sligo; Sligo, Ireland) to license the exclusive global rights to research, develop, manufacture and market a controlled release hydrogen peroxide technology that provides broad spectrum antibacterial and antiseptic properties.

This proprietary platform technology provides a full range of product solutions for the wound care, oral care and personal care markets ranging from antimicrobial professional products to personal hygiene solutions for consumers. The technology allows entry into major new market opportunities, HemCon said.

Of particular significance, the technology has shown good potential in early studies for the treatment of fungal nail infection, which affects tens of millions of people in the U.S. and the global market size for its treatment products is about $4 billion.

The platform technology releases hydrogen peroxide through a carefully controlled process allowing control of the dose and of the period of delivery of the produced hydrogen peroxide. The hydrogen peroxide at the required level is slowly released over a controlled time, providing a steady dose while ensuring that the levels produced are below those that could be harmful.

• Varicent Software (Toronto) reported that its Varicent SPM has been selected by Smith & Nephew Endoscopy (Andover, Massachusetts) to manage, model, analyze and report on incentive compensation plans and sales performance. Varicent SPM was selected after a comprehensive competitive evaluation.

"We have two primary goals in adopting sales performance management," said Mark Towne, director of global information services at Smith & Nephew. "The first was to find a solution that would allow us to quickly model new plans in order to keep up with the ever-changing requirement of our business. The second goal was to select a sales performance management platform that our many divisions can standardize on, making our processes and procedures uniform across the business. Varicent SPM was selected based on their ability to provide us the speed, flexibility and visibility for our sales compensation across all of our business units."

• Premier Purchasing Partners (Charlotte, North Carolina), the healthcare purchasing unit of Premier (San Diego), reported a new agreement for manual microbiology with BD (Franklin Lakes, New Jersey). The 36-month agreement, effective Oct. 1, is available to acute-care and continuum-of-care members of the Premier healthcare alliance.