A Medical Device Daily

Cardinal Health (Dublin, Ohio) and SRI/Surgical Express (Tampa, Florida) reported a five-year supply and co-marketing agreement to offer surgical kits that include disposable health care products from Cardinal Health and reusable health care products from SRI Surgical.

The agreement makes Cardinal Health the exclusive manufacturer of SRI Surgical's complete line of more than 400 disposable surgical kits. In addition, the agreement provides for the development of a new product offering, the Hybrid Preference Pack, in which SRI Surgical will combine its reusable surgical components with disposable surgical components from Cardinal Health. This new product will couple the convenience of disposables with the waste-wise benefits of reusable products.

SRI Surgical will deliver, reprocess and retrieve Hybrid Preference Packs on a daily basis for customers through its 10 reprocessing plants and four distribution centers located throughout the U.S. SRI Surgical's reprocessing plants provide a closed-loop process that delivers just-in-time sterile surgical linen, surgical instruments and disposable components to the operating room.

Cardinal Health will manufacture the disposable surgical components for Hybrid Preference Packs at its network of four kit manufacturing facilities, where it already assembles more than 21 million disposable surgical kits each year.

In other agreements/contracts news:

• Accuray (Sunnyvale, California) reported that Fox Chase Cancer Center (Philadelphia) has purchased a CyberKnife Robotic Radiosurgery System. The CyberKnife System at Fox Chase will be the third to be installed in Pennsylvania, and will be housed in a new radiation facility currently under construction in Buckingham.

Established in 1904 in Philadelphia as the nation's first cancer hospital, Fox Chase is one of the leading cancer research and treatment centers in the U.S. Fox Chase houses some of the most sophisticated technology for cancer surgery, radiation and diagnostic imaging.

Accuray said the CyberKnife System will enable Fox Chase to expand its radiation offerings to patients who may not have been able to tolerate other treatments or have medically inoperable tumors. The system uses real-time tracking capabilities to deliver with sub-millimeter precision high doses of radiation to tumors, even while they move with respiration.

A non-invasive treatment, the CyberKnife System does not require the use of stereotactic frames or painful, uncomfortable respiratory gating techniques. The CyberKnife System also is the first and only robotic radiosurgery system for the treatment of tumors anywhere in the body.

• Amicas (Boston), a developer of radiology and medical image and information management solutions, reported a new partnership with Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. This partnership will enable Cincinnati Children's to streamline imaging operations with state-of-the art image and information management capabilities.

As a 100% Web-based solution, AMICAS PACS was designed to enable radiologists to provide excellent patient care through powerful workflow capabilities and clinical tools. RadStream was designed to reduce medical-legal risk by automating and documenting critical results communications. RadStream also automates the prioritization of imaging exams based on a "most likely to interrupt" method, which has been shown to dramatically increase radiologist productivity.

• Acuo Technologies (St. Paul, Minnesota), developers of high-performance software for intelligent medical image management, data migration tools and services, reported contracting with Rush University Medical Center (Chicago, Illinois) for a new vendor-neutral archiving solution which becomes the basis of the hospital's medical image management platform.

The archiving solution is based on the Acuo Technologies DICOM Services Grid software storing to Rush's existing storage management system thus leveraging existing technology investments Rush has made in storage.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Acuo Technologies' integrated medical imaging solution, the DICOM Services Grid, allows Rush University Medical Center to gain control of more than 40 terabytes of existing medical data such as X-rays and cardiology images, as well as providing a robust image management layer for all future medical imaging content.

The company said its solution provides Rush an open systems standards-based automated system with business continuity, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership by eliminating the expense of multiple proprietary systems.

The solution selected by Rush is designed to allow all medical images to be stored on the Acuo archive, allowing the hospital's electronic medical record (EMR) portal to have one location to retrieve patient images, instead of multiple integrations and locations.

Rush University Medical Center also will be using the Acuo DICOM Assisted Migration (ADAM) to move data from the existing proprietary archive into the Acuo vendor neutral archive, ensuring that Rush will be able to gain control of their data and never pay for a migration again.

The Acuo solution will be used as the PACS-neutral Archive of Record for all future PACS system purchases. This strategy will enable Rush to add applications directly to the Acuo Archive without expensive and complex integrations to existing and future PACS.

Using the standards-based approach, the Acuo solution will eliminate costly and time-consuming data migrations in the future.