A Medical Device Daily

Symbion (Nashville, Tennessee), owner and operator of short-stay surgical facilities, reported signing three separate agreements with healthcare systems for the development of surgery centers in Florida, Texas and Minnesota.

Symbion will have a minority ownership and a management agreement in all three centers. Terms of the transactions were not disclosed.

Symbion signed an agreement with an affiliate of the Adventist Health System (AHS; Winter Park, Florida) for the development of a freestanding surgery center in Orange City, Florida. The center, scheduled to open at the end of 2007, will include three operating rooms and one procedure room.

The company also signed an agreement with King’s Daughters Hospital (Temple, Texas) and a group of surgeons affiliated with King’s Daughters Clinic to develop a freestanding surgery center in Temple. Expected to open in the first quarter of 2008, the center will include two operating rooms and one procedure room.

The third agreement is with Fairview Health Services and University of Minnesota Physicians (both Minneapolis), to develop a freestanding surgery center n Maple Grove, Minnesota. When the center opens in the later half of 2007, it will include six operating rooms and two procedure rooms.

In other agreements news:

• e-MDs (Austin, Texas), developer of the e-MDs Solution Series integrated electronic medical records and practice management system, has reached agreement to integrate Krames (Yardley, Pennsylvania) patient education into its e-MDs Chart Electronic Medical Record.

Users of e-MDs Chart will have access to a comprehensive library of patient education, available in English and Spanish, designed to improve patient understanding of health issues and options, increase compliance with physician recommendations, and ultimately aid in better outcomes. For those practices that also provide patients access to e-MDs Personal Health Record Portal, patients will also have direct access to the Krames Patient Education library ensuring availability of information across multiple patient touch points.

e-MDs develops solutions designed to create efficiencies in practice while aiding in the delivery of quality care.

Krames provides access to a database of content developed in accordance with the principles of health literacy and optimized for electronic delivery. Founded in 1974, Krames is a division of MediMedia (Chatham, New Jersey).

• Premier Purchasing Partners (Charlotte, North Carolina) reported new agreements for blood glucose meters, reagents, consumables and service have been awarded to LifeScan (Piscataway, New Jersey), a business of Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, New Jersey), and Roche Diagnostics North America (Indianapolis).

The 38-month agreements, effective Jan. 1, offer savings opportunities and new technology to acute-care and continuum-of-care members of the Premier alliance, Premier said.