A Medical Device Daily

Automated blood processing system maker Haemonetics (Braintree, Massachusetts) reported that it has signed a multi-year agreement to supply its Cell Saver 5 surgical blood salvage family of products to Fresenius Medical Care Extracorporeal Alliance (FMCEA), a division of Fresenius Medical Care North America (FMCNA; Lexington, Massachusetts).

Haemonetics said its revenues over the term of the new, multi-year contract are expected to total more than $12 million.

Surgical blood salvage, also called autotransfusion, recovers blood lost by a patient during surgery, cleans the blood, and makes it available for transfusion back to the patient, reducing or eliminating the need for the patient to be transfused with donated blood.

“This agreement allows us to leverage Haemonetics’ proven technology and FMCEA’s clinical expertise in our autotransfusion product offerings,” said Paul Zabetakis, MD, CEO of Fresenius Medical Care Extracorporeal Alliance.

FMCEA is a provider of contract extracorporeal services in the U.S., now serving more than 430 hospitals nationwide. The division performs more than 100,000 procedures annually in three main disciplines, including cardiovascular perfusion, autotransfusion and therapeutic apheresis.

FMCNA is a subsidiary of Fresenius Medical Care (Bad Homburg, Germany).

Impac Medical Systems (Mountain View, California), part of the Elekta Group (Stockholm, Sweden) and a provider of information technology solutions for oncology care, and the Coalition of National Cancer Cooperative Groups (Philadelphia), a national network of cancer clinical trials specialists, reported an agreement to incorporate the coalition’s clinical trial database into Impac’s electronic medical record (EMR) designed specifically for oncology.

Fewer than 5% of adult cancer patients are enrolled in clinical trials, largely due to the inability of healthcare providers to easily identify and match patients to available studies.

The agreement allows Impac to incorporate the coalition’s TrialCheck cancer clinical trial database directly into MOSAIQ, its image-enabled oncology EMR. MOSAIQ Trial Management will provide clinicians with direct access and screening capabilities for trials sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI; Bethesda, Maryland), the Cancer Co-operative Groups and other publicly and privately funded sources, while also supporting screening for specific trials open to accrual at their home treatment facilities.

“We estimate that as many as 200,000 newly diagnosed cancer patients each year may be clinically eligible to participate in a clinical trial, yet only about 50,000 patients actually participate.” said Dr. Robert Comis, chairman and president of the coalition. “Our goal is to see that every cancer patient is routinely screened for possible matching to a clinical trial.”

In other grants/contracts news:

• GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wisconsin) said that the first Canadian installation of the company’s next-generation volume computed tomography (CT) scanner, the LightSpeed VCT, at London Health Sciences Center’s (LHSC) Westminster Campus (London, Ontario).

The LightSpeed VCT, the world’s first volume CT system, according to GE Healthcare, enables cardiologists to capture images of the heart and coronary arteries in five heartbeats – something no other CT system can offer. In seconds, physicians can obtain the information they need to diagnose disease and life-threatening illnesses including cardiovascular disease, stroke and chest pain.

“We’ll be breaking barriers in speed and accuracy of patient exams, and will be able to offer new and enhanced diagnostic procedures, particularly for our trauma and pediatric patients, thanks to our new LightSpeed VCT,” said Dr. Rethy Chhem, chief of radiology at LHSC. “Some Volume CT procedures can be done in only one simple exam, and this will greatly benefit both physicians and patients.”

The LightSpeed VCT is designed to have the capability to attain 43-millisecond temporal resolution, which means physicians can effectively freeze the motion of the heart in a scan and secure extremely high-quality images of coronary arteries in submillimeter detail, GE Healthcare said.

In a single rotation, the Lightspeed VCT creates 64 high-resolution anatomical images as thin as a credit card. Those images are combined to form a three-dimensional view of the patient’s anatomy for the physicians to analyze.

• Spectrum Health System (Charlotte, North Carolina) has signed a three-year agreement valued at more than $1 million to implement Premier’s (San Diego) Clinical Advisor performance improvement solution in five of its seven hospitals in western Michigan.

The agreement provides Spectrum Health with clinical benchmarking and utilization data as well as the ability to track clinical performance against 270 hospitals participating in the CMS/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration Project. The three-year program will determine if economic incentives are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care.

Premier’s Clinical Advisor is powered by the Perspective database, which it said is the largest clinical comparative database in the country, providing patient-level detail to identify opportunities for improvement in clinical quality and efficiency. Through Clinical Advisor, hospitals are improving care processes and outcomes by integrating the latest evidence-based clinical research; identifying specific drivers of clinical quality variance; and evaluating physician practice variations, it said.