Contracts for GE, MEDHOST, Toshiba, Varian

The University of North Carolina Health Care System, Chapel Hill (UNC) has selected GE Healthcare’s Centricity Business Solution as part of the organization’s efforts to optimize organizational performance. Centricity Business solution delivers financial and administrative capabilities to increase efficiency, optimize business performance and enable hassle-free healthcare by streamlining workflow at every point of patient-staff interaction, the company said. 


MEDHOST announced that Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital in Elkin, N.C. has implemented its MEDHOST full-suite Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) to increase emergency department (ED) efficiency and the level of patient care.


Toshiba America Medical Systems announced that the University of Florida’s Veterinary Medical Center (UFVMC) has installed nearly $2 million of medical imaging equipment that is being used to diagnose large and companion-animals, including horses, dogs and cats among others. The new Vantage magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system and Aquilion 8 computed tomography (CT) scanner will improve the center’s imaging capabilities, enabling them to quickly and painlessly identify problems and proceed with the best treatment possible.


The National Cancer Centre in Sri Lanka will install the country's first medical linear accelerator, a Clinac system from Varian Medical Systems. The system will be implemented late in 2007. The machine, ordered as part of a project funded by the Sri Lankan health ministry, will bring added treatment capabilities to the hospital, which now uses Cobalt devices for delivering radiotherapy.

In other Varian news, the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center is among the first cancer centers in the nation to treat patients with Trilogy, the company’s image-guided radiation therapy system that delivers high-dose radiation to even the smallest tumors. The equipment can target an area as small as a pencil point, minimizing the damage to healthy tissue. It also delivers radiation doses more than 60 percent faster than conventional linear accelerators used to treat cancer, which means that patients can receive treatments in much less time, Varian said.

Around the web

The nuclear imaging isotope shortage of molybdenum-99 may be over now that the sidelined reactor is restarting. ASNC's president says PET and new SPECT technologies helped cardiac imaging labs better weather the storm.

CMS has more than doubled the CCTA payment rate from $175 to $357.13. The move, expected to have a significant impact on the utilization of cardiac CT, received immediate praise from imaging specialists.

The newly cleared offering, AutoChamber, was designed with opportunistic screening in mind. It can evaluate many different kinds of CT images, including those originally gathered to screen patients for lung cancer. 

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