A Medical Device Daily

Healthcare services company McKesson (Alpharetta, Georgia) reported that the Practice Partner Research Network (PPRNet) at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC; Charleston) received a $1.2 million grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to research medication safety in the ambulatory setting.

The study, titled Medication Safety in Primary Care Practice-Translating Research into Practice (MS-TRIP), is a three-year demonstration project that will define a set of medication safety quality indicators, incorporate these performance indicators into practice management reports and assess the impact of the PPRNet-TRIP quality improvement model on the indicators.

Currently, PPRNet membership consists of 137 physician practices representing more than 700 healthcare providers and 615,000 active patients in 38 states. Steven Ornstein, MD, director of PPRNet and professor of family medicine at MUSC, is the principal investigator for the study.

“Medication errors in primary care practice are an important cause of morbidity, but the extent of these errors in the outpatient setting is largely unknown, and effective interventions for reducing these errors need to be developed and tested,” said Andrea Wessell, PharmD, assistant professor of clinical pharmacy and outcome sciences at the South Carolina College of Pharmacy and a co-investigator of the MS-TRIP study. “PPRNet is an ideal real-world laboratory for primary care practices across the U.S. that are interested in quality improvement.”

“Since 1995, we’ve been working with PPRNet and hundreds of providers to help practices use EHRs to improve quality,” said Andrew Ury, MD, VP and general manager of McKesson’s Practice Partner business. “It will be exciting to see PPRNet’s efforts applied specifically to the important issue of medication safety.”

Planned medication safety quality indicators include avoidance of inappropriate therapy; inappropriate dosing based on age, weight and/or renal function; drug-drug interactions; drug-disease state interactions; and adverse drug event prevention.

In contracts news:

• QuadraMed (Reston, Virginia) reported that the Department of Veterans Affairs has again awarded the company an annual Task Order contract under its existing Blanket Purchase Agreement, with a stated value of roughly $21.8 million. This most recent Task Order renews the term license for QuadraMed’s Encoder Product Suite, and for related training services for all Veterans Affairs medical centers nationwide during the government’s fiscal 2008. VA medical centers have been licensed to use QuadraMed EPS since 2005.

QuadraMed EPS is an integrated Health Information Management (HIM) and Revenue Cycle Management solution used by the HIM and billing departments of all VA medical centers. It includes software for inpatient and outpatient coding, compliance, claims editing and revenue cycle workflow.

“This $21.8 million Task Order includes annual term software licenses of $18.3 million, providing an increase of approximately $4.8 million over FY contracted license fees and services of $3.5 million for the government’s fiscal year 2008, which ends on Sept. 30, 2008,” the company said. Additionally, QuadraMed was granted an extension to the fiscal 2007 contract through March 2008, in order for it to deliver the remaining $2.3 million of the services under that order.

• Nanogen (San Diego), a developer of advanced diagnostic products, reported that it has delivered the second phase milestone requirements, including the point-of-care prototype device to detect influenza viruses rapidly in clinical samples, to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; Atlanta) for its evaluation.

Nanogen, together with business partner HX Diagnostics, had been awarded a contract from the CDC to fund an accelerated multiphase development plan for a rapid diagnostic test for pandemic flu. Delivery of the prototype device is an important milestone demonstrating the feasibility of meeting the CDC’s specifications for the rapid test. The company is continuing product development and initiating clinical trials, with further funding of the project pending approval by the CDC.

Each year 5% to 20% of the U.S. population is affected by the flu virus, with about 36,000 deaths each year caused by the infection. Healthcare agencies are concerned about the possibility of a deadly subtype, such as avian flu, rapidly emerging and causing a pandemic.

Tests such as the one being developed by Nanogen under this contract will not only help healthcare providers to reliably diagnose the influenza virus, but also will be able to act as a sentinel for a potential outbreak of a pandemic H5 strain.

• The TauriGroup (Alexandria, Virginia) reported that it has been selected to provide Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) support for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Health Affairs Early Detection Division Chemical and Biological Early Detection (CBED) program. The contract is valued at nearly $38 million and the period of performance is three years and three months.

Early detection and response to a chemical or biological terrorism event is crucial for saving lives and mitigating the consequences of an attack. The CBED program’s operational strategy is to integrate DHS capabilities to detect, characterize, and respond to chemical and biological terrorism and to ensure system interoperability, provide consistent consequence management guidance, and appropriate assistance to federal, state, and local agencies. In its role as SETA contractor,

The Tauri Group will support DHS in coordinating, managing, and improving existing bio- and chem-surveillance program operations, financial management and analysis, information management, and interagency cooperation.

The Tauri Group was founded in 2001 by managing partners Carissa Bryce Christensen, Cosmo DiMaggio III and Mark Herzing.