• Draeger Medical (Telford, Pennsylvania) said it will unveil a new remote access capability to the U.S. market at NTI 2006. The new Infinity Symphony Suite takes valuable patient information that is accessible at the central monitoring station and makes it available virtually anywhere via the hospital intranet. The company said Infinity Symphony expands clinicians' access to vital data, provides a more complete picture for patient assessment, and simplifies consultations with colleagues. Infinity Symphony is an option for the MultiView Workstation, which provides retrospective views of Infinity patient monitoring data. Clinicians can view up to 16 stored waveforms and access arrhythmia and alarm events and trending, and generate a wide variety of chart-ready reports. When Infinity Symphony is deployed with Infinity WebViewer and Infinity VentWatch, these applications are fully integrated and provide single sign-on and single patient selection.

• X-Cell Medical (Princeton, New Jersey) said that the company has completed enrollment in its ETHOS II multinational clinical trial to study the safety and effectiveness of the ETHOS coronary stent system. ETHOS II drug eluting stents (DES) are coated with a second generation formulation of 17(beta)-estradiol, an approved drug used in hormone replacement therapy and other indications, and are designed to enhance safety through substantially reduced polymer load and estradiol dose. Estradiol-specific elution kinetics were also designed based on the company's porcine tissue uptake studies. The ETHOS II trial is complimentary to the company's ongoing ETHOS I trial, with full six-month follow-up data to be reported in the second half of 2006.

• YourMedChart.com (Des Plaines, Illinois) has introduced what it said is the first online medical records archives developed from the practitioner's standpoint. Unlike other online medical archives where patients input their own data, YourMedChart.com includes only official records, reports and images from healthcare providers and physicians. Patients subscribe to YourMedChart.com via the web site, and then ask their physician to send in their medical records via mail, e-mail or fax. YourMedChart.com can accept electronic documents and paper documents, as well as X-ray, MRI and CT films. Once received, a team of physicians and healthcare professionals organize and upload the reports and images into classifications that are commonly used in medical practice. Patients choose which physicians are authorized to access their records, and provide them with a secure password. Patients can access their own records at any time using a secure login.