Medical Device Daily

Cardinal Health (Dublin, Ohio) reported a three-year dual source agreement with Novation (Irving, Texas), a healthcare contracting services company, to provide Presource custom procedure kits and Procedure Based Delivery System (PBDS) modules to the 11,500 hospital and surgery center members of the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC), VHA and Provista.

Cardinal will supply these customers with Presource kits and PBDS modules for all areas within the acute care hospital and surgery center environment, including the operating room, labor and delivery, cardiac catheterization lab and interventional radiology lab.

Tara Schumacher, a Cardinal spokesperson, told Medical Device Daily that the kits are custom-made for a specific procedure at a specific hospital.

Creating the kits is a process that involves several steps, Schumacher said, during which the company talks to the hospital's materials managers and clinicians to find out what all the items are that they need to do the specific procedure. Once the custom kits are made the hospital can either buy them in bulk or receive several shipments of them a day, she said.

"So a clinician doesn't have to go around and pick 20 different things they need for the procedure," Schumacher said.

Cardinal also will use its Preferred Choice Program to assist UHC, VHA and Provista members in improving product standardization and cost management. Through this program, Cardinal says it works with each customer to identify all products needed for a Presource kit, and then recommends clinically equivalent options for those products. By providing high-clinical-quality product alternatives, this program helps customers to reduce supply costs while maintaining their focus on patient and practitioner safety.

Schumacher said the Presource kits are great for cost containment, and also offer an opportunity for the hospital to build in some patient safeguards.

"It's primarily about improving procedure supply chain efficiency," Schumacher said.

Also, she said, because the clinicians don't have to spend time doing the picks themselves, the kits tend to increase turnover time so that the hospital is able to fit more procedures in a day.

Cardinal Health also has finalized an agreement with Neoprobe (also Dublin, Ohio), a developer of oncology and cardiovascular surgical and diagnostic products, to market and distribute Lymphoseek through its network of more than 150 nuclear pharmacies.

The companies first disclosed signing a term sheet for the distribution of Lymphoseek in July.

Cardinal will have exclusive U.S. rights to distribute Lymphoseek for an initial term of five years following FDA clearance to market the product.

Lymphoseek (Technetium Tc99m DTPA-mannosyl-dextran) is a radioactive lymphatic mapping targeting agent being developed by Neoprobe for use with handheld gamma detection devices, such as Neoprobe's neo2000 system. After achieving positive efficacy results in recently completed Phase II multi-center clinical trials for Lymphoseek, Neoprobe said it is now moving forward with preparations for two Phase III clinical trials; one in breast cancer and one in melanoma.

In other agreements:

• LifeNet Health (Virginia Beach, Virginia) reported a partnership with Integrated Medical Systems (IMS; Birmingham, Alabama) to create new software tools for LifeNet Health customers, improving the tracking of allograft bio-implants. The tissue tracking software will help LifeNet customers better track their tissues and inventory and create a stream-lined system that provides life-enhancing tissue grafts to hospitals in a timely process, the company said. The system will track tissue implants throughout hospital locations specified by the user, and the technology will manage and control inventory for them. More than 2,000 healthcare facilities through the U.S. have partnered with IMS, also known as the InstrumentReady company. LifeNet is a biomedical alloengineering organization and organ and tissue donation agency.
• Amerinet (St. Louis), a national healthcare group purchasing organization, and its partner Advantage Healthcare Net (Grand Forks, North Dakota) have formed a new alliance, called the Northern Star Alliance, intended to reduce costs and create new efficiencies for 28 providers in Minnesota. Amerinet said it would provide resources through its portfolio of product and service contracts to meet the needs and challenges of the alliance members. The partnership will focus on Total Spend Management Solutions including data integrity and price accuracy, savings identification, financial and operational benchmarking, and educational opportunities. Amerinet will also implement cost reduction initiatives by aggregating members purchasing volume to identify standardization opportunities and to deliver additional cost savings to the alliance members through enhanced tiered discounts.