A Medical Device Daily

Allscripts (Chicago), a provider of clinical software, healthcare connectivity and information solutions, reported that The Johns Hopkins Hospital (Baltimore) has selected its HealthMatics Emergency Department Information System to automate administrative and patient care processes in its Emergency Department (ED) and urgent care center. Allscripts valued the contract agreement at about $900,000.

Johns Hopkins Hospital is a 1,017-bed academic medical center affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. More than 108,000 patients visit the hospital's Emergency Department and urgent care centers every year.

HealthMatics ED will integrate with existing hospital information systems to provide enhanced communication, better management of high-risk patients, and improved access to critical patient information both inside and outside the hospital, Allscripts said.

The ED product features single-screen views of all ED activity, patient tracking and electronic medical records, real-time views of orders and results, patient-specific decision support information, and risk management tools reducing medical errors.

Community physician members of the Johns Hopkins Health System (JHHS) will be able to access ED records for their patients through JHHS's community-wide physician portal, which will receive ED encounter information from HealthMatics ED, enabling ambulatory physicians to quickly determine the treatment and medications their patients received in the ED.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital also will connect HealthMatics ED with its inpatient health information system from Eclipsys, enabling interoperability of clinical and financial information within the hospital.

In grant news:

Advance Nanotech (New York), a provider of financing and support services for the commercialization of nanotechnology-related products for homeland security and display technologies, reported that its subsidiary, Owlstone Nanotech, has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award of $99,080 from the National Science Foundation to develop an integrated field asymmetric ion mobility sensor for volatile organic compound (VOC) detection.

Many VOCs are either known or suspected to be hazardous to human health and are important constituents of both indoor and outdoor air pollution, and there is considerable interest in developing the ability to measure and monitor VOC levels in domestic and industrial environments; however, the technologies for detecting these compounds have lagged behind market need.

Owlstone said it will use the SBIR grant to employ the company's field asymmetric ion mobility spectrometry (FAIMS) technology in the development of a small, low-cost sensor suitable for air quality monitoring and early warning fire detection.

Owlstone Nanotech is part of Advance Nanotech's Homeland Security Division which includes nanotechnologies providing solutions across two application areas: CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiation, Nuclear and Explosive) and Wireless Monitoring for cognitive awareness, triage and first response therapy.