A Medical Device Daily

National Interop (Seattle) reported it has been awarded a project to significantly upgrade the radio system serving air ambulances across a 12-state region.

The company said the new system is expected to be more reliable, and will increase the quality of patient care by enabling better communications among medical flight crews, first responders and hospitals.

National Interop was awarded the contract by Air Evac Lifeteam (West Plains, Missouri), an independently owned and operated air medical service. The project will upgrade Air Evac Lifeteam’s radio system to use open, standards-based Radio Over Internet Protocol (ROIP).

National designed the system after a thorough assessment of Air Evac Lifeteam’s current operations and needs, and conducted a survey of the currently available technologies that could be used for a radio system that must accommodate a large geographic area at a reasonable cost. National ultimately recommended an underlying network implemented with Cisco routers as radio interfaces, and Twisted Pair Solution’s WAVE for standards-based radio over Internet Protocol software.

“One of our objectives in the design was to find a way to provide a completely redundant, always-live second dispatch center for Air Evac, should their primary dispatch facility in Missouri be disabled or destroyed in a disaster,” said David Billstrom, CEO of National Interop.

“Configuring additional users in a standards-based ROIP environment is so affordable, we will be transforming the existing dispatch equipment in their training academy from a mock-up of a typical dispatch environment, to a fully equipped dispatch environment, ready to use as a backup dispatch center at any moment,” he said.

In other contract news, Cardiac Science (Bothell, Washington) reported that it has signed two contracts to supply Powerheart automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and program management services to hundreds of locations worldwide.

Cardiac signed one exclusive five-year deal to supply Powerheart AEDs and program management services at all of CH2M HILL’s (Englewood, Colorado) locations in the U.S. CH2M HILL provides services in engineering, construction and operations for public and private clients, with more than 23,000 employees in offices around the world.

The other deal, with Cummins Engine (Nashville), is designed to supply Powerheart AEDs and program management services for all of Cummins Engine’s 222 worldwide locations. The Powerheart AEDs will replace another manufacturer’s AEDs in a number of Cummins facilities.

A $12-billion company with 34,000 employees worldwide, Cummins Engine is a manufacturer of diesel engines and power generation products.