A Medical Device Daily
Sutter Health (Sacramento, California) reported receiving a $6.1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (San Francisco) to expand and develop model patient safety programs over the next four years within the Sutter Health network, a Northern California system of hospitals, physicians and other healthcare services.
The grant is believed to be one of the largest awards for patient safety ever provided to a healthcare system in the U.S., Sutter said. And Sutter is matching the award with another $6.1 million.
Patrick Fry, president/CEO of Sutter, said, “This grant helps us to advance the adoption of evidence-based nursing practices and increase investment in additional services that ensure the health and well-being of our patients.”
The Sutter network invests in patient-oriented information technology, such as medication bar coding, the electronic intensive care unit and the electronic health record. Sutter also has implemented programs to improve nurse satisfaction, retention and quality of work life; enhanced compensation and benefits for nurses; and expanded opportunities for career growth, continuing education and training.
Sutter Health is a family of not-for-profit hospitals, physician organizations and medical services that share resources and expertise to advance health care quality.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation develops outcome-based projects intended to improve the quality of life.
In other grants/contracts news:
• Agilent Technologies (Santa Clara, California) reported that the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health has bought a full site license for a range of Agilent bioinformatics solutions. Terms were not reported.
NCI is making several solutions available to its intramural program researchers: Agilent GeneSpring GX for gene expression, Agilent CGH Analytics for comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) studies, Agilent Chip Analytics to analyze chromatin immunoprecipitation-on-chip data (ChIP-on-chip), and GeneSpring GT for genotyping and SNP analysis.
The license will enable standardization of bioinformatics platforms so that users communicate using the same terms and share comparable training and support.
Jordan Stockton, gene expression marketing manager for Agilent, said the company is “proud” of its relationship with the NCI, “especially in helping their researchers employ such emerging applications as a CGH and ChIP-on-chip in conjunction with gene expression to accelerate the search for ways of controlling cancer.”
Agilent provides microarray-based genomics solutions.
• Affymetrix (Santa Clara, California) reported that it has signed another agreement for Wyeth (Madison, New Jersey) to use its GeneChipmicroarray technology for three more years, further extending the relationship that began in 1994. Wyeth will continue to apply Affymetrix technology for its drug discovery and development process.
The latest GeneChip technology is expected to enable Wyeth to more accurately classify disease, predict clinical progression and determine likelihoods of treatment success, Affymetrix said.
Affymetrix said its scientists invented the world’s first high-density microarray in 1989 and began selling the first commercial microarray in 1994.
• PortBlue (Los Angeles), a provider of web-based expert systems, reported that Amerinet (St. Louis), a major healthcare purchasing organization, has extended its agreement with PortBlue, offering the company’s Command-Aware hospital incident response and capacity management system to Amerinet member hospitals.
Amerinet initially selected PortBlue as its preferred provider of disaster management systems last year. With full commercial launch of the system this summer, the renewed contract will extend special pricing to almost 2,000 hospital members.
In addition to day-to-day surge capacity management, CommandAware will enable healthcare facilities to more efficiently prepare for, manage through and recover from large-scale incidents and mass casualty events.