I chatted with Nicholas Cain this morning, Managing Director of Cain Medical.
Cain Medical is based in Paris, also with offices in London. They
provide a server-based medical device connectivity solution. Nicholas
started his firm earlier this year, after spending over a year in
development. Cain Medical is the third vendor in a group including HEI (and their LinkIt) and Capsule Technologie.
What sets Cain Medical apart is their focus on providing a robust
server-based medical device data service that provides medical device
connectivity and data acquisition for telemedicine (like VisICU) or
paperless charting. As a start up, Cain Medical is currently focused on
the European market. They hope to have their initial pilot/reference
sites soon.

Cain Medical's server runs on LINUX for a variety of reasons. First,
fewer hackers target the LINUX platform for malicous code compared to
Microsoft (and as an open source operating system, provides greater
transparency and assurance when vulnerabilities are discovered). High
availability server configurations are easier (and lower cost) to
implement on LINUX compared to Microsoft platforms. The server is
script drive to enable customer configuration and includes a web server
for “lights out” management. A database stores and forwards all device
data, providing acknowledgement and re sends of data when required.

During our call, we talked about various market trends (standards, EMR
adoption, market segmentation) and discussed potential similarities to
the IEEE 1073 MIB and DICOM.
The diagnostic imaging PACS market and the adoption of DICOM provide an
interesting model for considering medical device connectivity. Time
will tell how solutions like Sensitron or devices with their own connectivity (like smart pumps or telemetry) fit into solutions like Cain Medical's.

This is definitely a company to keep an eye on.