Cardiac Science (Irvine, California) said it has expanded its multi-year strategic distribution agreement with GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wisconsin) under which GE will begin marketing Cardiac Science's line of Powerheart-branded automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and fully-automatic in-hospital defibrillator-monitors (CRMs) to hospitals in the U.S. and Canada. GE's hospital sales force will begin marketing Cardiac Science's recently FDA-cleared Powerheart AED G3 PRO, the Powerheart AED G3 and Powerheart CRM in 1Q05. Cardiac Science will support the GE sales effort via a group of sales specialists located in strategic North American locations.

Conor Medsystems (Menlo Park, California) entered into an international distribution agreement with St. Jude Medical (St. Paul, Minnesota) for Conor Medsystems' Costar cobalt chromium paclitaxel drug- eluting stent for the treatment of restenosis. Under the agreement, St. Jude Medical agreed to be the exclusive distributor of the Costar stent in Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand and will be responsible for sales and marketing in those territories. Conor Medsystems will retain manufacturing rights and sell the product to St. Jude Medical. In connection with the distribution agreement, St. Jude Medical has provided a $5 million loan to Conor that will convert into shares of Conor common stock in certain circumstances.

GE Healthcare has signed a three-year agreement with VHA (Irving, Texas) a cooperative that serves more than 2,200 healthcare organizations nationwide. GE has been selected as one of VHA's suppliers for clinical information systems. The agreement covers GE's Centricity clinical information systems (CIS) portfolio, which consists of acute-care core clinical products; computerized provider order entry (CPOE); care team documentation; MAR with bar coding, pharmacy; lab; Physician Office electronic medical record; practice management and cardiology solutions. The new CIS technologies also provide VHA members an option to access GE's Medical Quality Improvement Consortium, an on-line, queriable database of 3 million de-identified patient records and outcomes that will help VHA members proactively manage chronic diseases.

SourceOne Healthcare Technologies (Mentor, Ohio), a distributor of medical imaging systems, equipment, radiographic consumable supplies, and service to healthcare providers, and CompuMed (Manhattan Beach, California), a developer of computer-aided telemedicine and diagnostics technology in the cardiology and musculoskeletal fields, reported that they have signed a new nationwide distribution agreement.