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Real-time medical tests delivered to a cell phone

Their first joint product is a system that monitors fetal and maternal heart rhythms and can deliver that to a physician on-call as she makes her round.
Written by Dana Blankenhorn, Inactive

A San Antonio wireless solutions company and an Atlanta-based medical testing company are teaming up to deliver medical testing results to doctors' phones in real time.

(Image from AirStrip Technologies.)

AirStrip Technologies of San Antonio is the wireless company, Alere Health (formerly Inverness Medical) the medical testing company, and their arrangement is basically a marketing deal. AirStrip already offers a suite of wireless monitoring products, including a cardiology product.

But Alere has two things AirStrip lacks. It has a distribution channel, hospitals which trust it. And it has the ability to deliver specific solutions to specific problems its customers have.

Thus their first joint product, a system that monitors fetal and maternal heart rhythms and can deliver that to a physician on-call as she makes her round. While AirStrip focuses on the home market, Alere will get it into the hospital arena.

AirStrip OB is already approved by the FDA and will be pitched as a way to avoid medical errors.

But this could also be the start of something rather large. Combine the breadth of AirStrip's product line with the depth of Alere's connections to hospitals, and the breadth of Inverness' own testing line, and you can easily see a wide variety of wireless medical monitoring being delivered to the channel quickly.

The success of these products in the hospital market, in turn, could increase sales to nursing homes and, in time, to the consumer market.

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