A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Masimo (Irvine, California) said that it has signed a three-year, dual-source agreement with Novation (Irving, Texas), the healthcare contracting services company of VHA (also Irving) and the University Health System Consortium (UHC; Oak Brook, Illinois).

The agreement covers Masimo SET pulse oximetry and Masimo Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry, including stand-alone monitoring devices, hand-helds and sensors. The competitive bid process involved an extensive clinical review and a technology value analysis by Novation's pulse oximetry task force.

Masimo is the inventor of read-through motion and low-perfusion pulse oximetry, a technology called Masimo SET (for Signal Extraction Technology), which it said has been proven more accurate and reliable in the most challenging clinical settings by more than 100 independent clinical studies.

Building on this technology platform, Masimo recently introduced Masimo Rainbow SET, a new technology that uses eight wavelengths of light to allow clinicians to capture and monitor an unprecedented array of patient physiological data noninvasively. Rainbow SET capabilities will be available in Masimo monitors and in multi-parameter patient monitors produced by leading manufacturers.

The Rad-57 Pulse CO-Oximeter, the first FDA-cleared Rainbow SET product from Masimo, is a hand-held device that allows clinicians to detect and monitor carbon monoxide levels in the bloodstream non-invasively.

In clinical studies and in the field, Rad-57 has proven itself effective in detecting carbon monoxide poisoning in seconds, allowing accurate diagnosis and early treatment of a life-threatening problem that frequently is misdiagnosed as flu or migraine.

Masimo said that it has other new Rainbow SET monitoring capabilities in advanced development and that the ability to noninvasively detect and monitor methemoglobin levels in the blood is pending FDA clearance. A recent Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) study fo-und that methemoglobinemia, a potentially lethal condition that starves the tissues of oxygen, is much more common in hospitalized patients than previously realized.

Joe Kiani, Masimo's chairman and CEO, said that since being added to the Novation contract in 2003, the company's annualized sales to Novation hospitals have increased by more than 5,000%.

Legacy Health System (Portland, Oregon) a not-for-profit healthcare system comprised of five hospitals in the Portland/Vancouver metropolitan area, 14 clinics and a system of referral laboratories, and Sysmex America (Mun-delein, Illinois) reported entering into a five-year contract for Sysmex to standardize hematology instrumentation, training, technical support and service for Legacy facilities.

"The multi-location use of hematology instrumentation among Legacy hospitals and clinics provides work efficiencies through standardized instruments and operational procedures," said Mary Perkins, hematology manager for Legacy. "We wanted to improve our laboratories' efficiencies without compromising quality or quick turnaround times. We also wanted highly reliable, intelligent and accurate systems that operate with minimal operator intervention."

Legacy Health System's hematology installations include 13 XE2100 and XT Hematology Systems, combining Sysmex hematology analyzers with automatic transport and data management.

In other grants/contracts news:

• Spectrum Diagnostic Imaging (Cleveland), a provider of outpatient diagnostic imaging services, has selected Franklin & Seidelmann Subspecialty Radiology (F&S; also Cleveland) to provide its radiology interpretation services.

A letter of intent, expected to be finalized within 60 days, calls for F&S to provide all of Spectrum's radiology interpretation services for 14 of its sites. The F&S network of virtual subspecialty radiologists will work in conjunction with Spectrum's on-site expert radiologists.

Spectrum Diagnostic Imaging provides diagnostic imaging services through 16 facilities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Florida, with annual procedure volumes exceeding 100,000.

• DR Systems (San Diego) reported six new RIS/PACS contracts totaling nearly $3.5 million. The facilities awarding the contracts include Portneuf Medical Center and Idaho Medical Imaging (both Pocatello, Idaho); Pueblo Medical Imaging (Las Vegas, Nevada); Grays Harbor Com-munity Hospital (Aberdeen, Washington); Marcus Daly Memorial Hospital (Hamilton, Montana); and St. Joseph Medical Center (Polson, Montana).

DR Systems is an independent provider of scalable, film-free medical systems and paperless information systems for diagnostic imaging centers and hospitals.