A Medical Device Daily

GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wisconsin) reported that it has signed a five-year, $1.2 million agreement with Boston Medical Center (BMC; Boston), the largest “safety net” hospital in New England. GE will install Centricity Pharmacy, a medication management and clinical decision support tool, at the 547-bed academic medical center in Boston’s South End.

The Centricity system provides tools for pharmacy managers, pharmacists and nurses to efficiently distribute medications as prescribed by healthcare professionals, and monitor the use of drugs across the organization, helping to prevent adverse interactions. The Centricity Pharmacy software will also be linked with BMC’s Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) System and Medication Administration Record (MAR) to create a closed-loop medication management solution.

Boston Medical Center is a private, not-for-profit, academic medical center affiliated with Boston University School of Medicine.

GE Healthcare also reported a six-year Centricity PACS SE contract with Norfolk General Hospital (Simcoe, Ontario). The 121-bed hospital is the first site outside of the U.S. to install the PACS SE system, GE said.

With a recent expansion and increase in the volume of diagnostic images, Norfolk General Hospital decided to install PACS to help with the additional work volume, GE said.

StemCo Biomedical (Durham, North Carolina) said that it has signed a worldwide distribution agreement in which StemCell Technologies (Vancouver, British Columbia) will distribute StemCo’s Aldelfuor product.

StemCell Technologies had previously distributed Aldefluor only in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific territory, excluding Japan.

Aldefluor is a kit that enables identification of stem and progenitor cells for research, utilizing StemCo’s dehydrogenas Aldehyde(ALDH)-based technology. ALDH is an intracellular enzyme found in stem and progenitor cells. The product is manufactured under GMP and has been marketed since 2003 as a research-use-only reagent.