A Medical Device Daily

Providence Health & Services (Seattle), a 28-hospital system, has signed a five-year, $11 million agreement with the Premier (Charlotte, North Carolina) healthcare alliance to use Premier’s Clinical Advisor for quality measurement, benchmarking and regulatory reporting.

Premier’s Clinical Advisor solution offers benchmarking, analysis, consulting, knowledge-sharing and other customized services designed to help hospitals and health systems close performance gaps identified through use of comparative data and data mining technologies. Clinical Advisor is powered by Perspective, which Premier said is the largest clinical, financial and operational comparative database in the nation, providing patient-level detail to identify opportunities for improvement in clinical quality and efficiency.

In other grants/contracts news, MAGNET (Mid-Atlantic Group Network of Shared Services; Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania), a healthcare group purchasing organization, has signed a new five-year contract with Eastman Kodak (Rochester, New York) that makes Kodak’s digital imaging products available to more than 12,000 MAGNET member facilities.

Under terms of this agreement, MAGNET participating healthcare facilities — including hospitals, clinics and growing medical practices — can now purchase KODAK computed radiography (CR) systems, Kodak digital radiography (DR) systems, Kodak laser imaging systems as well as a variety of X-ray films.

MDD releases new report on orthopedics market

The publishers of Medical Device Daily have just released a new 200-page report focusing on the orthopedics sector, Orthopedics 2006 – Trends, Challenges and Opportunities.The report provides detailed insight into the trends impacting the orthopedics sector.

By focusing on emerging technologies and device developments in orthopedics, this new report divides the industry into its primary sub-sectors, and describes the key companies and device technologies being developed in each. “Aside from analysis we provide on the emerging sectors, we also delve into which areas are most vulnerable to current pricing pressures, such as the impact of hospital influence on the industry, along with recent FDA actions,” says Associate Managing Editor Holland Johnson.

For information on purchasing this report, call our customer service department at 1-800-688-2421 or 1-404- 262-5476, or go to www.MedicalDeviceDaily.com.