A Medical Device Daily

My Healthy Access (Houston) reported an agreement with NuPhysicia (Houston) for the operation of telemedicine clinics in select Houston-area Wal-Mart (Bentonville, Arkansas) supercenters. In order to ensure that patients can differentiate between the physician-directed services provided in the company's clinics and the nurse-based services provided by most other retail clinic operators, the parties have agreed to operate under the trade name "Walk-In Telemedicine Health Care."

The program is one of the services of NuPhysicia, which says it is "the private medical services company produced from the longest-running and largest telemedicine program in the world at the University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston)." Physicians will serve patients using its proven remote telemedicine through paramedics who will welcome and examine patients under direct supervision of a physician.

"Simply put, the paramedic serves as the 'hands' of the physician, who uses medical devices such as an electronic stethoscope to listen to the heart, or other scopes that can see down the throat or in the ears and the physician sees and hears everything live and in real time," said Glenn Hammack, president of NuPhysicia. "The physician performs the exam as if he or she was in the room with the patient."

Hammack said the program replaces the care typically provided by nurse practitioners at retail clinics. "Our alliance takes that care a step further, bringing new levels of service, convenience and value to the retail healthcare setting through interactive physician visits."

"[W]e began evaluating proven telemedicine methods, and this led us to NuPhysicia," said Kathleen Delaney, president of My Healthy Access "Our partnership with NuPhysicia will ... offer us even greater potential for new business strategies in the future."

My Healthy Access is a provider of retail healthcare services to the urban marketplace.

NuPhysicia operates telemedicine methods developed by the University of Texas Medical Branch.

In other agreements:

• AOL Health (New York) reported content partnerships with Caring.com (San Mateo, California), Health.com (Washington) and HealthCare.com (Miami), saying the agreements will position it as a resource for comprehensive health information for the entire family.

Here is what the companies will offer.

Caring.com, www.caring.com, will provide content focusing on care for elderly parents. Health.com, www.health.com, will share health-related articles, quizzes, galleries and videos. HealthCare.com, www.healthcare.com, will provide access to its Care Provider Search, which includes more than 1.3 million medical and dental professional listings.

• Vocollect Healthcare Systems (Pittsburgh) and TeleHealth Services (Raleigh, North Carolina), a provider of communications solutions for healthcare, reported a partnership in which TeleHealth will resell AccuNurse voice-assisted care to deliver broadened solutions for its customers.

The addition of AccuNurse to TeleHealth's family of interactive solutions enables TeleHealth customers to leverage voice-assisted care as part of the overall solution, with the ability to provide better quality of care for residents while improving facilities' profits, Vocollect Healthcare said.

Vocollect Healthcare Systems, a subsidiary of Vocollect, says it brings "the power of voice" to long-term care facilities. Using simple spoken dialog, staff hear care plan details and document activities as they are completed, using the natural voice.