A Medical Device Daily

The Beaumont Technology Usability Center (Royal Oak, Michigan) said it is assisting the FDA in a national patient safety initiative to prevent tubing and catheter misconnection errors in pediatric intensive care units. The project, a part of the Medical Product Safety Network program — or MedSun — is expected to conclude in April 2007, the center said.

“In the healthcare industry, many medical tubing connection devices are utilized to deliver medication, gases, and nutrition,” says Izabella Gieras, BTUC’s director of technology management.” These devices frequently have similar or even identical connectors, despite their different clinical applications (e.g., epidural, intravenous, intestinal, etc.). The similarity of these connectors in a busy health care environment presents a real risk of misconnection errors, with potentially lethal consequences.”

In other agreement news:

• M2SYS Technology (Atlanta) reported it has formed a relationship with the Dental Systems Group of Kodak (Rochester, New York) to integrate its patent-pending fingerprint software into the Kodak Orthotrac Practice Management Software.

With the integration, Kodak’s customers will be able to secure sensitive patient information and comply with HIPAA requirements, while improving productivity and user experience by eliminating the time associated with password management.

“We were able to rapidly add a much needed biometric authentication module to our practice management software and avoid the burden of low-level fingerprint SDK integration,” noted Kodak’s Dental Systems Orthodontic Product Manager, Susan Whitt. “M2SYS delivered a solution that also supports Citrix and Terminal Services. Now we have a proven fingerprint system to simplify the process of employee and patient management, and an extra level of security.”

Bio-Plugin is designed to enable software companies to quickly integrate a complete, seamless fingerprint recognition system, including a 1:N identification engine.

• Reflect Scientific (Orem, Utah) reported that one of its subsidiaries, Cryometrix , has entered into a manufacturing agreement with Vander-Bend (Sunnyvale, California) for its advanced programmable Ultra Low Temperature cryogenic storage systems.

“Vander-Bend is an excellent resource,” said Nick Henneman, director of manufacturing for Cryometrix, “one that has enabled us to meet our goal of increasing capacity in a cost-effective and quality production environment.”