A Medical Device Daily

Cerner (Kansas City, Missouri) and Hill-Rom (Batesville, Indiana), an operating company of Hillenbrand Industries, reported that they have partnered to integrate their technologies to improve and coordinate healthcare delivery, featuring Hill-Rom intelligent hospital beds that communicate directly with the Cerner Millennium healthcare computing platform.

“The hospital environment has become increasingly complex, with the nurse having to manage multiple IT applications and sophisticated medical devices,” said Michael Gallup, vice president and general manager of Hill-Rom IT Solutions. “Our partnership with Cerner brings together two market-leading companies committed to transforming care at the bedside by driving interoperability between applications and medical devices.”

Using the Cerner CareAware global device connectivity architecture, the intelligent bed is able to feed data, including patient weight, bed rail position and head elevation, to the Cerner Millennium system.

The companies said access to real-time information and automation of labor-intensive tasks not only furthers safety initiatives, but also allows clinicians to spend more time with patients.

Colubris Networks (Waltham, Massachusetts), a provider of intelligent wireless LANs (WLANs) for enterprises and service providers, reported that Cardiac Science (Bothell, Washington), a maker of automatic public-access automated external defibrillators, selected Colubris WLAN equipment to mobilize its portable electrocardiograph (ECG) devices at healthcare institutions.

Colubris said that with mobile wireless ECGs, healthcare organizations can complete critical medical tests more quickly and improve employee productivity.

Cardiac Sciences’ portable ECG carts communicate with healthcare information systems through its Pyramis ECG data management system, enabling physicians to order ECG tests and review results online.

Using Colubris technology, Cardiac Science enables wireless connectivity for its portable ECG carts. Technicians can receive ECG orders instantly and conduct tests at the patient bedside — without having to connect the cart to a physical cable.

Colubris also reported that it is working with AeroScout (San Mateo, California), a provider of unified asset visibility solutions, to allow organizations to track equipment, mobile devices, patients and personnel via a Colubris wireless network.

Current and future Colubris healthcare customers will be able to use AeroScout’s real-time location solution to maximize patient safety, more effectively use equipment, improve business processes and enhance patient care.

The Colubris and AeroScout agreement provides organizations with a way to implement location-based services by leveraging existing WLAN investments and eliminating the need to purchase a separate stand-alone asset tracking solution.

In other agreement news:

• Healthcare Management Systems (HMS, Nashville, Tennessee) said it has partnered with ExitCare (Lake Elmo, Minnesota) to bring its patient education information into the latter firm’s more than 500 customer facilities nationwide.

“By incorporating ExitCare’s patient education documents into HMS clinical applications, we are enhancing our customers’ ability to communicate effectively with their patients to improve compliance and safety,” said Tom Stephenson, president/CEO of HMS.

HMS also has signed an agreement with Community Health Systems (Nashville). CHS will deploy a range of HMS clinical and financial solutions in more than 40 additional CHS facilities. HMS solutions are currently implemented in 71 CHS hospitals.