A Medical Device Daily

After receiving nearly 200 proposals from academic and research health organizations across the U.S., Microsoft (Redmond, Washington) said it is increasing the amount of award funding under its Microsoft HealthVault Be Well Fund from $3 million to $4.5 million.

The software colossus said proposals represent "a wide range of innovative online solutions designed to address significant health issues, including childhood obesity, medication reconciliation, mobile health information gathering and dissemination, and diabetes management, as well as to help people manage their health more effectively."

It said the level of interest and participation in the request for proposals (RFP) has made it one of the most successful Microsoft research RFPs in company history.

A panel of judges, representing leaders from across the health field, will determine the recipients of awards from the Microsoft HealthVault Be Well Fund. Recipients will be announced at the second annual Microsoft HealthVault Solutions Conference, taking place June 9-10 in Bellevue, Washington.

"We are at the beginning of a long journey to bring healthcare into the Internet Age — and no one company can do this alone," said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft. "We created the HealthVault Be Well Fund to stimulate invention by health champions who believe in the use of information technology to improve health and patient outcomes. We are delighted with the response and have increased the funding to help more organizations move faster to turn ideas into real online health solutions."

The fund has been designed to stimulate not-for-profit R&D across a broad range of health disciplines that have the potential to significantly improve health and outcomes for patients. It will help seed what Microsoft termed "innovative avenues of research and explore the potential for disruptive improvements to health management enabled by reuse and sharing of data between people, families, caregivers, doctors and facilities."

The HealthVault Be Well Fund was announced at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's (Chicago) annual conference in February.

In other grants/contracts news:

• Stroke survivors who have lost the use of an arm because of a stroke soon will have access to an in-home exercise device to help activate new brain pathways to improve arm function. A grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will enable further refinement of the patented device, to be called Tailwind, which was developed at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (Baltimore).

Tailwind will be available to recovering stroke patients this fall.

Clinical studies show that Tailwind improves arm movement in stroke survivors who have been paralyzed for months, even years, after a stroke. Through a licensing partnership with the medical school, Encore Path (also Baltimore) will market the invention in a compact, retractable and portable design.

The FDA has designated Tailwind as an exercise device for stroke patients. The $120,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke is awarded to both the medical school and Encore Path.

Co-inventors Jill Whitall, PhD, a professor in the department of physical therapy and rehabilitation science, and Sandra McCombe Waller, PhD, an assistant professor in the same department, created Tailwind through research they conducted in the late 1990s at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

So far, the device has been tested only in patients six or more months after their first stroke. McCombe Waller and Whitall have received funding to test the upgraded device in the sub-acute hospital setting, with patients who recently had a stroke.

• Premier Purchasing Partners (Charlotte, North Carolina) reported new agreements for ophthalmology products have been awarded to AMO Sales and Service (Santa Ana, California); Ambler Surgical (Exton, Pennsylvania); Bausch & Lomb (Aliso Viejo, California); BD (Franklin Lakes, New Jersey); and Surgical Specialties (Reading, Pennsylvania), doing business as Angiotech.

These 36-month contracts, effective July 1, are available to acute-care and continuum-of-care members of the Premier healthcare alliance.