A Medical Device Daily
3M (St. Paul, Minnesota) reported the award of a $3.76 million contract over three years to develop and install a system that uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track medical files at the U.S. Army's Fort Hood in Texas, the nation's largest active duty domestic military installation.
The company said the system is expected to improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery, the troop deployment process and the management of medical data collection.
The active medical records of more than 150,000 servicemen and women and their dependents are housed at five sites at Fort Hood, and as many as 70,000 files may be in use at the base's six clinics during the course of a month. The RFID system is intended to substantially reduce errors associated with manual tracking, retrieval, filing and file merging methods.
“The system is designed to provide continuous automatic inventory monitoring and automatic error notification; and, essentially, eliminate human compliance issues,” said David Erickson, 3M program manager and principal investigator for the project. “Recognition of RFID as a means of improving file management is growing rapidly, both within and outside of government.”
The contract covers choosing and optimizing the best radio frequency technology for the application, developing a system that includes shelf-based reading capabilities and specialized software tailored specifically to meet the military's processes, and the installation and training of personnel for its use, Erickson said.
In other grant news:
• Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia reported being awarded $470,000 from a private foundation for the development of new technologies aimed at improving cancer detection.
Xudong Fan and John Viator, assistant biological engineering professors in the College of Engineering and College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the university, received grants from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, a Florida non-profit foundation supporting biomedical research. They will build desktop computer-type devices that can be used for everyday clinical practice.
Fan will receive $238,000 for a prototype device capable of rapidly detecting cancer molecules using a single blood sample, testing for a number of proteins or DNA molecules that, if found together, indicate cancer.
“Within one doctor's visit, you could get results,” Fan said.
Viator will receive $232,000 for a laser device that works with sound waves to detect melanoma, by bombarding blood samples with laser light, sparking sound waves if it runs into as few as 30 melanoma cells. His goal is to make the mechanism sensitive enough to detect a single melanoma cell.
• Luminex (Austin, Texas), a multiplex solution developer, reported receiving a 12-month research grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which will be administered through the Department of the Army's U.S. Army Research Office.
The $300,000 grant will focus on developing the company's emerging chip-scale xMAP technology for biodefense applications. The chip-scale concept is an approach that leverages Luminex's flagship xMAP technology, a bead-based flow cytometry solution for multiplexing biological assays, to perform the detection of bio-pathogens on the scale of a microchip.
“A successful and practical solution for biosensors to combat terrorism will require a compact, and relatively inexpensive detector capable of doing species identification with high sensitivity and specificity; that is precisely the goal of the chip-scale xMAP technology project,” said Dr. John Carrano, vice president of research and development.