A Diagnostics & imaging Week

Carestream Health (Rochester, New York) reported it has secured a multi-million dollar order with the New England Region of the Veterans Health Administration for the company’s healthcare IT systems.

The New England Region — also known as Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) 1 — encompasses Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine and Rhode Island.

Carestream will provide IT offerings that include a Kodak Carestream PACS, a regional archive, data migration, network integration and other professional IT services to VISN 1. The company will install its PACS archiving and communications system along with three years of image storage capacity at each of the region’s eight hospitals.

In addition, the company will collect scheduling information from existing radiology information with each diagnostic imaging exam. It will also create a central regional archive with at least five years of Image storage capacity that will be managed by KODAK Carestream Information Management Solutions.

The contract also includes data migration from existing PACS systems and optional Carestream PACS features such as integrated voice dictation, orthopedic surgical templates, and native 3-D viewing of imaging exams.

Carestream is a provider of dental and medical imaging systems and healthcare IT solutions; molecular imaging systems for the life science research and drug discovery/development market segments; and X-ray film and digital X-ray products for the non-destructive testing market.

• Cepheid (Sunnyvale, California) said it has received two Veterans Affairs Federal Supply Service Schedule (VA/FSS) contracts for its GeneXpert System and the Xpert MRSA test for the rapid detection of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The two contracts, VA/FSS 65 VII and GSA 66, respectively cover the purchase of Xpert MRSA tests and GeneXpert systems. The contracts are expected to streamline the acquisition process and ensure VA hospitals and other federal agencies can buy GeneXpert systems and Xpert MRSA test kits without individual negotiations as they wait for funding for the next fiscal year, according to Cepheid.

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA), in January, issued a directive requiring all VHA facilities to implement MRSA surveillance programs of all patients. While this directive does not mandate polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, it advises molecular-based testing wherever feasible, the company said.

Cepheid said that the Veterans Integrated Services Network (VISN) 12, known as Great Lakes Health Care System, plans to screen every patient admitted to and discharged from intensive care units and projects to complete about 40,000 Xpert MRSA tests a year. VISN 12 provides healthcare services to 1.1 million veterans in Illinois, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Wisconsin and Northwest Indiana.

The company says that the GeneXpert system is designed to produce accurate results in a timely manner with minimal risk of contamination. Three clinical diagnostics for the GeneXpert system have received FDA clearance for marketing in the U.S. including Xpert MRSA for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Xpert EV for enteroviral meningitis, and Xpert GBS for Group B Streptococcus.

In grant offerings:

• Carnegie Mellon University (CMU; Pittsburgh) reported receiving a $5 million gift from Ray and Stephanie Lane to establish the Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology.

The gift also will endow a professorship and provide support for doctoral and post-doctoral training in this field. Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering Professor Robert Murphy will direct the center and has been appointed the first Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology, recognizing Murphy’s leadership in computational biology research, education and administration.

The center will build on Carnegie Mellon’s history of computational and interdisciplinary research and expand the understanding of biological systems using machine-learning methods. One of the center’s missions will be advancing the development of computational methods to improve cancer detection, diagnosis and treatment, especially by developing tools to enable automated creation of detailed, predictive models of a system’s behavior.

Murphy said that in many cases, pathologists today can’t accurately analyze biopsy slides to locate specific cancer-related proteins with certainty. “This limits their ability to prescribe the most effective treatment.”

Carnegie Mellon offers programs in engineering, computer science, robotics, business, public policy, fine arts and the humanities.