Product Briefs

• AutoPak Engineering (San Juan, Puerto Rico) has introduced the robotic Floating Pouch Handler, which allows medical, pharmaceutical and food packagers to quickly and efficiently handle sealed pouches. It said the system is ideal for IV solutions, medical devices, flexible containers with products such as juices and sauces and any liquid bag application. The system is designed to transfer pouches from indexing to continuous motion equipment or vice-versa. It places pouches into rectangular nests, ensuring correct orientation for any combination of continuous or indexing processes further downstream such as end-of-line packaging. Operating at speeds up to 250 pouches per minute, the Floating Pouch Handler accommodates pouches ranging in size from 3 inches x 3 inches to 12 inches x 18 inches.

• Geometrix (San Jose, California), a developer of 3-D biometric identity solutions, reported the launch of its ActiveID Biometric Identity System, featuring the company's FaceVision 3-D facial recognition technology. The ActiveID product family includes the world's only passive 3-D biometric camera, plus a scalable and customizable set of software products for identity management.

• HP (Hewlett Packard; Palo Alto, California) has introduced the HP Medical Archiving Solution and the HP Forms Automation System 1.2, both of which will be showcased by the company at next week's Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society annual conference in Dallas. Designed for radiology practices within diagnostic imaging centers, clinics and hospitals, the HP Medical Archiving Solution provides long-term storage of patient studies regardless of size. Physicians can then securely and simultaneously access this information in order to collaborate across departments and medical facilities. The HP Forms Automation System 1.2 is digital pen-and-paper technology, providing users the simplicity of a traditional pen and paper with the functionality and speed of the Internet. The HP Medical Archiving Solution features open standards for interoperability. The solution interfaces with existing single and multi-PACS applications, while also supporting the archiving requirements of pre-PACS environments. It is expected to be commercially available later this month in North America and Europe. Both solutions are expected to be available later this month.

• MedQuist (Mount Laurel, New Jersey) has introduced Protege, its latest digital handheld dictation solution, which it said is designed to create greater versatility for physicians who need to dictate on the go. The Protege is a compact digital portable recorder that not only captures patient demographics, but offers seamless integration with MedQuist's DocQment Enterprise Platform and DocQment Encore, which the company described as the market's top-ranked dictation solutions. Protege offers one-button control, a large LCD for efficient status viewing, five user-defined demographic fields, a barcode scanning option to capture demographics and software to map demographics to the appropriate data fields in DocQment Enterprise Platform and DocQment Encore.