A Medical Device Daily

A new business out of the Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland, Ohio) will develop technology enabling physicians to monitor chronically ill patients remotely, from watching blood pressure via telephone lines to one day keeping tabs on heart rhythms from a distance.

The new business has teamed with a venture capital firm, Glengary (Cleveland), and Dan Carlin, MD, a telemedicine physician in New Hampshire and an information technology veteran in Massachusetts to form VitalStream Health, the latest out of the Clinic's spin-out arm, CCF Innovations.

The system will be used to gather health information from afar to generate online patient report cards that doctors will use to help treat people. The idea belongs to Glengary and Carlin, founder of telemedicine practice WorldClinic (New London, New Hampshire) in 1998.

Drawing from his experience as a medical officer in the Navy and as an expatriate volunteer, Carlin said he designed WorldClinic to be a "teledoctor" for patients who are far from modern medical care. "My patients who are scattered around the world are getting older," Carlin said. "I needed a way to do a better job of taking care of them."

Glengary, allied with Baldwin-Wallace College (Berea), invests in early-stage companies, mostly in northeast Ohio.

Dr. Marc Penn, director of the Clinic's Bakken Heart-Brain Institute and medical director of its coronary intensive care unit, will be the lead clinical researcher on the project.

The partners are raising money and hiring the management team to run VitalStream Health, Rosenfeld said. Glengary also will invest in the startup.

ACR launches new CRO

The American College of Radiology (ACR; Reston, Virginia) has launched ACR Image Metrix, a contract research organization (CRO) that will leverage ACR's experience in large-scale clinical research to accelerate advances in radiologic care and fund future research.

ACR Image Metrix said it will offer a menu of imaging CRO services, from study design to design of electronic data forms and image archiving, to image interpretation and quantitation.

ACR Image Metrix is headquartered in the college's Philadelphia office, alongside the ACR clinical research division, a radiology research organization.

The ACR and the American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN) develop trials that standardize the use of imaging technologies, image transmission and archive, and quantification of image data to reduce variability, reduce the size and cost of trials and produce more reliable results.

"ACR Image Metrix is another avenue to advance one of the college's key missions, to advance the science of radiologic care through large-scale clinical research," said Bruce Hillman, MD, director of scientific affairs for Image Metrix.

The organizations said that revenue from the research projects by ACR Image Metrix will be used to fund future ACRIN, Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, and Quality Research in Radiation Oncology (Q-RRO) studies.