A Medical Device Daily
Abbott (Abbott Park, Illinois) reported signing a group purchasing agreement with Premier (San Diego) for a broad array of the company's diagnostic products. The three-year contract covers all of Abbott's immunochemistry analyzers, reagents and accessories, as well as all CELL-DYN Hematology analyzers, products and service.
Abbott said that the contract represents potential sales to Premier members in excess of $300 million over three years.
Abbott said it will work with Premier to help with laboratory automation, which will help member hospitals deliver quality lab results while maximizing resources.
"Our products have proven themselves in enhancing the productivity of high volume labs," said Scott Luse, divisional VP of marketing for Abbott Diagnostics. "We look forward to partnering with Premier to help its member hospitals improve operating efficiencies and patient care."
Serving 1,700 hospitals and more than 44,000 other healthcare sites, Premier bills itself the largest healthcare alliance in the U.S. dedicated to improving patient outcomes while safely reducing the cost of care.
Abbott Diagnostics offers a range of instrument systems and tests for hospitals, reference labs, blood banks, physician offices and clinics.
In January Abbott reported plans to sell its core laboratory diagnostics business, including the Abbott Diagnostics Division and Abbott Point of Care, to General Electric (Little Chalfont, UK) for $8.13 billion in cash (Medical Device Daily, Jan. 22, 2007).
The sale is subject to regulatory approvals
In other agreements:
• Pentadyne Power (Chatsworth, California), a maker of clean energy storage systems using composite flywheel technology, reported entering into a memorandum of understanding agreement (MOU) with Toshiba International (TIC; Houston) for Toshiba to sell Pentadyne's flywheel in medical and broadcasting UPS applications.
The Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system division of TIC is offering the Pentadyne VSS+DC energy storage system with Toshiba's G8000 series of UPSs as a battery-free reliable power solution primarily for in-patient treatment/diagnostic equipment and for television broadcast facilities in North, Central and South America.
"Our current OEM distributor focuses on the data center and IT sectors, while [TIC] will focus on applications in the patient care, broadcasting and industrial markets," said Frank DeLattre, senior VP of sales and service at Pentadyne. "Toshiba targets those specific vertical markets with an advanced UPS system that's exceptionally well suited to those applications. Adding the Pentadyne VSS+DC flywheel as a clean energy storage option to their product portfolio offers a wealth of benefits to these customer segments where we have a great fit, but limited reach to date. The MOU enables [TIC] to sell our product into underserved markets without creating channel conflicts in the data center/IT applications where our other partner is thriving."
Pentadyne's flywheel energy storage system can be used as a supplement to increase the reliability of conventional UPS lead-acid battery arrays, or can be used to eliminate the cost, maintenance and less predictable reliability burdens common to lead-acid batteries.
• DxCG (Boston), a provider of predictive modeling software, reported an alliance with BioSignia (Research Triangle Park), a developer of evidence-based statistical models.
DxCG will become a third-party reseller of BioSignia's Know Your Number (KYN) product, which it says is up to 35% more accurate for chronic disease risk prediction than conventional tools, and has up to 20% greater accuracy in diabetes sensitivity than the Rotterdam Prediction Model.
KYN was developed by BioSignia to address the needs of increasingly diverse populations by giving healthcare providers "clinically sound, actionable" information that may be used to track participants' progress and demonstrate the initiative's success.