• Omnicell(Boston), a provider of patient safety solutions, reported the addition of bar coding technology to its OmniLinkRx physician order management system in a move to boost the productivity of U.S. hospital pharmacies. The system will read a bar code which will associate a physician prescription order with a patient, the company said, adding that the OmniLinkRx enhancement will increase the overall efficiency of the pharmacy. Nurses use OmniLinkRx to scan physician orders and send an electronic mage to the central pharmacy for immediate verification. The system also offers a stat queuing capability to facilitate faster turnaround times.

• Teranode (Seattle), a provider of experiment design automation (XDA) software for the life sciences industry, reported the availability of Teranode Screening Automation, a complete informatics solution for screening laboratories with changing or emerging assay requirements. Teranode Screening Automation provides easy-to-deploy assay automation with flexible assay design and real-time analytics. Leveraging Teranode XDA, the solution makes it seamless for screening managers to maintain flexible operations and cost-effectively automate screens. Key features include the Teranode Design Suite; the Teranode model server; assay design templates and an integration library. The Teranode system includes software and services for installation, design and training.

• Varian Medical Systems (Palo Alto, California) said it is introducing the Acuity Brachytherapy Suite, which enables doctors to deliver real-time image-guided brachytherapy treatments. Currently in use at four cancer clinics in the U.S., the suite combines a Varian Acuity imaging system with technology for planning and delivering brachytherapy treatments. Varian’s Acuity imager generates 3-D images that can be used both for treatment planning, and for guiding the placement of catheters and needles during brachytherapy procedures. The company said the Acuity Brachytherapy Suite allows doctors to place catheters, acquire images for treatment planning, and deliver a treatment in as little as 30 minutes, without moving the patient room to room.

• Xenomics (New York), a developer of next-generation medical DNA technologies, said it has filed a U.S. patent application for its technology enabling the detection of HIV based on its Transrenal DNA (Tr-DNA) technology which uses simple, easily obtained urine samples. The patent application for the HIV test comes in the wake of Xenomics’ recently filed U.S. patent application for its Tr-DNA test for tuberculosis (MDD, June 8, 2005). The company said it believes that these tests may enable the creation of more sensitive and accurate medical diagnostic procedures that can be performed through simple, safe and relatively inexpensive analyses of the patients’ urine specimens. Xenomics’ tests are further distinguished by their ability to simultaneously detect in a single urine sample both HIV and tuberculosis, a common opportunistic infection in AIDS patients.