A Medical Device Daily
Carestream Health (Rochester, New York) reported it has secured a multimillion-dollar order with the New England Region of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) 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.
Isis Pharmaceuticals reported that its subsidiary, Ibis Biosciences (both Carlsbad, California), has been awarded four new government contracts totaling up to $4.2 million to advance the detection and identification of microbial threat agents for biodefense applications.
Three of these contracts are from the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS-S&T) and total up to about $3.3 million and a fourth contract, worth up to $900,000, is from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), an agency within the Department of Defense.
The contracts will fund Ibis’ development of sample preparation methodologies and validation of applications on the Ibis T5000 for broad biological weapon detection, the advancement of Ibis’ microbial forensics applications, and the enhancement of Ibis’ microbial database.
Ibis will continue to develop broad biological applications to identify and characterize important bacterial and viral agents that are considered crucial to maintain homeland security. Ibis will also use the funding to advance the application of the Ibis T5000 system in microbial forensics, a type of forensics used in the investigation of crimes involving infectious organisms. Under the DTRA contract, Ibis will broaden its technology in the area of biodefense through advances in sample preparation to allow detection of trace amounts of broad groups of microbial agents.
Ibis manufactures Ibis T5000 assay kits. Isis has a background in RNA to discover and develop novel drugs for its product pipeline and for its partners.
In other contract offerings: Medical Services International (Edmonton, Alberta) reported that it has begun shipping VScan test kits to the U.S. military for testing, according to a purchase order. Prior to shipping the company said it verified the accuracy of these kits in its in-house facility. The company is confident that its test kits will meet any and all testing standards required.
Medical Services is a holding company.