A Medical Device Daily

Siemens Medical Solutions (Malvern, Pennsylvania) and the Touro Infirmary (New Orleans) have signed an agreement through which Siemens will provide the Touro Infirmary with a long-term information technology (IT) managed services solution which includes management of Touro's complete IT operations and the implementation of Siemens Med Administration Check solution.

"Expanding Touro's relationship with Siemens provides us with a roadmap for the future," said Leslie Hirsch, president/CEO, Touro Infirmary. "We are looking forward to turning our vision of becoming a high performance organization into a reality with a leading-edge IT solution that benefits our patients, physicians and employees."

Siemens will work with Touro to create operational and financial efficiencies, and Touro and Siemens employees will cooperate in delivering IT solutions designed to meet the organization's needs.

Touro said it has implemented a range of Siemens Invision applications, using Invision to streamline information across clinical, financial, and administrative functions. Touro will also adopt Siemens Med Administration Check, designed by nurses and pharmacists, to support nursing medication administration workflow with online, point-of-care IT to reduce errors.

Siemens says Med Administration Check "is intended to close the loop on the medication use process by automatically validating and documenting medication administration using bar code technology to help confirm the 'six rights' of administration: right patient, right drug, right time, right dose, right route and right documentation. Medication administration details are captured in real-time at the point-of-care and automatically documented in the patient's electronic health record."

"Siemens Med Administration Check helps to improve patient safety by providing clinicians with quality tools that reduce the potential for human error," said Ralph Dean, senior vice president of administration at Touro. "Siemens products and services operate together to provide hospitals like ours with valuable tools to help improve quality, consistency, and achieve best practices on an organization-wide basis."

Additionally, Siemens says it provides Touro with "leading-edge" diagnostic imaging technologies including integrated solutions for interventional cardiology, nuclear medicine and echocardiography. Touro's long-standing relationship with Siemens includes the first installation of a biplane flat detector cardiac catheter imaging system. Touro recently installed syngDynamics, a multi-modality, dynamic catheter imaging review, Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS). syngoDynamics is designed to enable evidence-based reporting to help improve the efficiency of clinical procedures for cardiology, general imaging and OB/GYN. Additionally, the installation of a new cardiac catheter lab containing the Axiom Artis cardiology imaging system and Axiom Sensis for Hemodynamic monitoring is under way.

Touro Infirmary, founded in 1852, is a not-for-profit hospital.

In other agreements: StatSure Diagnostic Systems (Framingham, Massachusetts) reported that Inverness Medical (Waltham, Massachusetts) has introduced StatSure's barrel technology to the U.S. market.

In a deal signed in September 2006, Inverness became the exclusive, worldwide distributor of StatSure's platform for use in a rapid, point-of-care HIV test. Chembio Diagnostic Systems (Medford, New York) is the exclusive manufacturer of this test for Inverness. StatSure's technology will be marketed by Inverness under the Inverness Clearview brand.

Clearview Complete HIV 1/2 is an FDA-approved, qualitative screening test for the detection of antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2 in human whole blood, serum and plasma. The test utilizes a single lateral flow test strip that displays its result through visual observation. Clearview Complete HIV 1/2 is a single-use, self contained closed system for the collection, processing and analysis of the physiologic sample designed to provide the safest and easiest product of its type.

StatSure develops rapid immunoassays for the detection of sexually transmitted and other infectious diseases, and has developed a product line of oral-fluid collection devices.