A Medical Device Daily
Videre Conferencing (Quincy, Massachusetts), a provider of video, audio and web conferencing solutions, said that Brain Saving Technologies (BST; Newton, Massachusetts) has selected Videre to provide consultation, design and support services for BST’s regional Neuro-TeleMD Consortiums.
BST focuses on improving the care of stroke patients by arranging for advanced digital video medicine services and consultation services connecting physicians with neuro critical care experts around the clock.
Videre will provide technical guidance and support to BST, as well as recommendations on conferencing equipment. After careful consideration of the application requirements, Videre selected the Tandberg Intern II Tele-HealthCare Solution for BST’s Neuro-TeleMD Consortiums.
The Tandberg Intern II Tele-HealthCare Solution is designed to allow simultaneous audio and video transmission, and provides a bidirectional video-conferencing and image display capability to help physicians thoroughly evaluate, diagnose and recommend patient treatment. The system also enables patients and/or their families to interact directly with neuro critical care experts in real-time.
Zassi Medical Evolutions (Fernandina Beach, Florida) reported signing an agreement with MedAssets (Atlanta) to provide its bowel management system to MedAssets’ member facilities.
The 36-month agreement was effective May 1.
The Zassi Bowel Management System (BMS) provides healthcare clinicians with a bowel management catheter that helps them work more efficiently in reducing the incidence of hospital-acquired infections arising out of contact and contamination by feces from non-ambulatory patient populations. The Zassi BMS is the only system that safely manages all stool types and provides a means for clinicians to take stool samples hygienically and deliver drugs and medications, Possis said. The system also is uniquely designed and offered in multiple sizes to enhance patient comfort.
Zassi Medical is focused on creating and developing the bowel management practice area. The Zassi BMS is designed to provide advanced management of fecal incontinence that helps improve skin and wound care and assists in reducing patient and caregiver exposure to enteric organisms that result in hospital-acquired infections.
SRI International (Menlo Park, California), an independent, non-profit research and development institute, reported continuation of a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a unit of the National Institutes of Health (both Bethesda, Maryland), to model complex mammalian signaling networks based on signaling of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR).
The NIGMS grant provides support for the mathematical modeling of complex mammalian signaling and other biological networks, using SRI’s methods tools. Promoting the mathematical modeling of biological systems is a primary goal of NIGMS, which intends to disseminate such tools to biologists to help them understand the new paradigm of systems biology and to design experiments.
Longer term, SRI said these tools may prove useful in validating novel therapeutic targets and predicting the side effects of experimental therapies. This could dramatically speed drug development and improve the safety of new drugs – major issues for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies today.
In the project’s first phase, SRI demonstrated a novel computational approach to help researchers create, analyze, and test models of complex EGFR signaling networks. In the second phase of the project, SRI will increase the utility and predictive capabilities of Pathway Logic by enhancing the ability of researchers to interact with the models.
The ultimate research goal of Pathway Logic is to create models of large-scale signaling networks in defined cell types – computational models of mammalian cells defined in terms of their molecular responses to specific environmental signals.