St. Jude Medical (St. Paul, Minnesota) reported FDA approval of the company's new facility in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, for the manufacturing of pacemakers and cardiac leads.

The 150,000-square-foot facility, located in Arecibo's Santana Industrial Park, will initially be used to produce St Jude Medical pacemakers and cardiac leads for domestic and international markets, and the company plans to begin manufacturing implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) at the facility late this year. The new plant will expand the company's cardiac rhythm management manufacturing capacity and is expected to create at least 1,250 new jobs within the next three years.

St. Jude Medical specializes in products to assist cardiac, neurological and chronic pain patients.

Lifespan to pursue new medical technologies

Lifespan (Las Vegas) reported that it will be actively pursuing the development of the MyWebtel and MyScreenMd technologies. MyWebTel is the connectivity device that allows the home user to connect the MyScreenMd medical peripherals to web-based medical record storage facilities. This device can be a PC, PDA (Blackberry, Android, etc) or Laptop or any of the device specific products the company will be offering to the marketplace. The company's goal is to make it simple, and cheap for home users to safely, securely and simply transfer their medical information to web-based storage facilities in a secure and HIPAA compliant manner.

MyScreenMd is focused upon becoming the leading provider of Internet based home medical diagnostic and testing products using the MyWebTel devices in partnership with the medical community. The primary benefits of the MyScreenMD.com model are clinical, resulting in superior patient outcomes; psychosocial, resulting in better patient satisfaction, and economic, resulting in significantly lower costs for medical services.