Hospira Acquires Sculptor

“The market expectation has evolved from just a great medical device to one with connectivity.”

Mindray Acquires Datascope Patient Monitoring

Datascope will increase Mindray’s 2007 revenue by 53%.

Philips to Acquire VisICU

Philips announced yesterday that they reached a merger agreement to acquire VisICU for $12 per share, $3 over the current share price. From HIStalk, “Visicu earned $9 million on sales of $36 million over the past year. In
the 20 months since its IPO, Visicu shares have dropped from nearly $25
to below $9. Its board […]

LiveData Advances Medical Device Interoperability

Great news in Healthcare IT News:
LiveData has been awarded a $70,000 Small Business Innovation grant in order to
develop a plug-and-play feature to implement standards for OR workflow
and medical device interoperability. The plug-and-play feature will enable devices to work together, to
create safety interlocks, and help ensure that clinicians make
decisions based upon all available information.
LiveData’s provides data […]

Philips Acquires Emergin

Philips announced this week that they have acquired private health care IT vendor Emergin for an undisclosed sum. From the Philips press release:
Emergin is the leading US provider of software utilized to rapidly
transmit medical alarm signals throughout hospitals. The transaction is
expected to close […]

Medsphere Settles with Cofounders

For those of us interested in new business models and open source software, Modern Healthcare has a nice overview story the evolving relationship between Medsphere and the open source movement.

On June 26, 2006, Medsphere filed a $50 million, 12-count lawsuit
in Orange County (Calif.) Superior Court against the Shreeves and 20
other unnamed defendants, alleging […]

Is Microsoft HealthVault Safe?

Many have criticized HealthVault regarding privacy and security concerns, or perceived limitations of HV as a personal health record (PHR). I suspect that HV is challenged more by the market's perception of Microsoft's long running security issues than with any actual shortcomings of that type in HV. And since HV is not a PHR, but […]

New Qualcomm Chip Swings Both Ways

Qualcomm released a new 3G chip that supports both EV-DO (Verizon and Sprint) and HSDPA (AT&T and T-Mobile). This will result in radio cards that will run on either technology and provide the greatest choice in selecting carriers.
The chips are apparently targeting laptops and should appear in new laptops by the second quarter of […]

Microsoft Health Vault and Telehealth

Vince Kuraitus and I have a blog post up at the Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare. Titled, What Will Microsoft's HealthVault Mean to the Telehealth Community?, the post explores the role Health Vault's Connection Center software may play in the commoditization of remote monitoring solutions.

Today, telehealth applications are based on point […]

eVent Medical Ventilator Incorporates Web Server

The ventilator market is an interesting one - there are many more vendors than in most other product categories, and greater product differentiation between vendors. This is also a product category where hospitals have, for the most part, been unsuccessful in standardizing on a single vendor.
I came across an interesting ventilator vendor the other day, […]