A Medical Device Daily

The AT&T Foundation (Rochester, Minnesota), the corporate philanthropy organization of AT&T, reported a $900,000 medical technology contribution to Mayo Clinic to fund the expansion of the Mayo Clinic Life Sciences System (MCLSS) in support of individualized medicine.

MCLSS is a combination data warehouse and search engine that currently stores millions of patients' clinical and genomic data and identifies subsets of patients with specific genetic features and medical histories.

As part of its collaboration with IBM, Mayo Clinic is capturing consenting patients' genetic information and medical histories in the MCLSS, where it becomes a reference for accurately prescribing medical solutions for other patients with similar genetic profiles and medical backgrounds. Mayo Clinic will use the AT&T Foundation gift to expand MCLSS in order to store additional genomic and prescription data and then make this data retrievable by scientists throughout the Mayo Clinic. Data in this expanded system also will be used by physicians to support real-time clinical decisions in actual patient settings.

As many as 100,000 Americans die each year from harmful reactions to medicine, and more than 2 million require hospital attention. One of the immediate benefits of personalized medicine is minimizing those effects.

In contract news:

• Alere Medical (Reno, Nevada), a health management company, reported that it has been chosen by the State of Colorado to manage its Medicaid recipients with heart failure. The new contract is in addition to Alere's existing contract with the state, which is successfully managing its Medicaid asthma patients.

Alere will be instrumental in helping Colorado's Medicaid members, who have no primary care physician, to establish a medical home. "The establishment of a medical home is vital for these members with chronic heart failure, who would benefit from regular contact with a physician," said Christy Hunter, disease management coordinator for the state. "We have been very satisfied with the way Alere has managed our asthmatic members and want to expand that initiative to our members with heart failure."

• IntraNexus (Virginia Beach, Virginia) reported a multi-year contract extension with Advocate Health (Oak Brook, Illinois). "We are very happy to celebrate our 15 year relationship with Advocate Health by signing a new, multi-year agreement for Sapphire," said IntraNexus CEO Richard O'Pry.

Advocate Health is one of the first IntraNexus clients to take advantage of the improved Sapphire functionality, part of the latest annual product upgrade kit.