A Medical Device Daily

Bayhealth Medical Center (Dover, Delaware) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS; Philadelphia) have entered into an affiliation agreement to provide expanded cancer diagnosis, treatment, research and education to Delaware residents. Bayhealth is the first healthcare facility in Delaware to become a member of the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Network, UPHS noted.

The network encompasses a select group of community hospitals throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania and now Delaware, UPHS said. The network of hospitals provide cancer care in collaboration with the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). The affiliation will provide Bayhealth's cancer patients with direct access to the latest medical research and clinical trials close to home in a community hospital setting, the organization said.

"Our partnership with Penn will provide our patients with the most comprehensive cancer care available today," said Bayhealth President/CEO Dennis Klima. "We look forward to working with Penn specialists to develop additional mutually supportive programs that will further benefit our patients throughout Delaware."

In other agreements/contracts news:

• Proximity Systems (Houston) reported that Centerpoint Medical Center (Independence, Missouri) a Hospital Corporation of America (HCA; Nashville) facility, has installed more than 400 Proximity Workstations. The units hold IT equipment, medical supplies and facilitate patient care, the company said.

Proximity WorkStations have been deployed in all patient rooms at Centerpoint as well as the Emergency Department, human resources department, lounges and public areas. Proximity says its WorkStations are credited with: improving efficiency, through saving time and reducing the distances nurses walk; improving record accuracy; maintaining face-to-face communication and assisting with patient education.

• Compliance 360 (Atlanta), a provider of on-demand software solutions for enterprise governance, risk management and compliance (eGRC), reported that Palomar Pomerado Health (PPH; San Diego) has selected it to serve as the manager of Palomar's compliance and contract management activities.

PPH is a multi-facility healthcare provider whose facilities include the 319-bed Palomar Medical Center (Escondido, California) and 107-bed Pomerado Hospital (Poway, California).

• Private Access (Aliso Viejo, California) and Genetic Alliance (Cambridge, Massachusetts), reported forming a public-private partnership designed to simultaneously protect patients' privacy rights while creating a faster and more cost effective way for researchers to connect with patients in order to find causes and treatments for chronic illnesses and diseases. Leaders of both organizations believe that their combined efforts will help transform today's medical research environment, saving time and money, producing better outcomes, and in a manner that respects each individual patient's right to decide with whom they share their confidential health information.

Genetic Alliance says it brings together diverse stakeholders that create partnerships in advocacy; integrates individual, family, and community perspectives to improve health systems; and revolutionizes access to information to enable translation of research into services and individualized decision-making.

Private Access develops web-based applications intended to solve the privacy hurdle that the medical community faces when attempting to recruit subjects for clinical trials and to share confidential records in pursuit of faster diagnoses and better treatments for diseases and chronic illnesses.

• Unibased Systems Architecture (USA; Chesterfield, Missouri) reported the successful go-live of its nursing perioperative charting at Inova Fairfax Hospital (Falls Church, Virginia). This completes the implementation in all Inova Health System Hospitals. Inova is using USA's periOperative Resource Management System to support their surgery management system needs throughout the enterprise.