News from MWA: Christie Medical Holdings Debuts Latest Version of VeinViewer Device at MWA

They came, they schmoozed, and they left.

Few, if any, exhibitors attending this week’s inaugural Medical World Americas (MWA) Conference and Exposition (April 28-30) used the event to launch new products, preferring instead to focus on potential partnership development.

One company, however, intentionally timed its product release to coincide with the start of the Houston, Texas-based event. Christie Medical Holdings Inc. of Memphis, Tenn., debuted its sixth-generation VeinViewer, a device that uses near-infrared light, digital light processing and other tec-hnologies to create a real-time high-definition image of subcutaneous vasculature and blood patterns on the skin’s surface.

“We chose to launch the product here because this is an international show and we’re a global company,” Erin Shelton, senior marketing communications specialist, told Medical Product Outsourcing from company’s exhibit booth. “Medical World Americas is not a super-specific niche show. Our product is relevant to almost every department in a hospital other than billing, so the timing for this announcement worked out really well.”

The timing was impeccable, really. The MWA’s clinically oriented conference program attracted hundreds of doctors, nurses, medical students and other healthcare professionals, many of whom emanated from the 21-hospital Texas Medical Center, a virtual stone’s throw from the MWA’s venue in downtown Houston. Christie Medical was one of 128 exhibitors who displayed and demonstrated their products during the event, a collaborative effort between the Texas Medical Center, Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Messe Düsseldorf North America. The trio spent the last three years planning the conference, which largely was modeled after Messe Düsseldorf’s Medica tradeshow in Germany.

Despite light attendee traffic, many exhibitors said they made quality connections during the conference. Shelton and her Christie Medical booth colleagues used the MWA platform to find distributors for VeinViewer Vision2, a smaller, longer-reaching device than its predecessors. The Vision2 also features three new image customization modes: Tricolor, which creates a tailored multi-colored image of a patient’s skin tone based on clinicians’ needs; Image Capture, which collects static images of blood patterns for electronic medical record documentation; and MaxBright (the brightest image).

Christie Medical’s VeinViewer device portfolio is designed to improve intravenous needle (IV) access and reduce IV start time. The technology works by projecting near-infrared light onto the skin; the light is absorbed by blood but reflected by surrounding tissue. VeinViewer captures the information, processing it through a computer to create and subsequently cast a full field, high-definition digital image of a patient’s vein pattern onto his or her skin.

The product can detect peripheral veins up to 10 millimeters, blood patterns up to 15 millimeters and lines as tiny as 0.22 millimeters, a particularly useful feature in pediatric vein assessment due to “baby fat” and the smaller overall nature of children’s blood vessels. “Newborns can be tricky, they’re constantly moving and their veins are small,” she noted. “The VeinViewer is popular with pediatrics.”
VeinViewer has been shown to improve IV first-stick success and decrease IV start time by up to 100 percent, and reduce medically unnecessary peripherally inserted central catheters (PICC) lines more than 30 percent. A quality improvement study evaluating the use of VeinViewer at Elizabeth Healthcare in Kentucky found that clinicians avoided 261 medically unnecessary PICC lines in nine months compared with a 2012 baseline. The reduction—based on an average national PICC cost of roughly $700—potentially saved St. Elizabeth more than $180,000, the analysis concluded.

“The VeinViewer platform of devices as a hospital-wide solution has been clinically proven to substantially increase patient satisfaction scores and reduce both unneeded PIV [peripheral intravenous] and PICC attempts,” said Chris Schnee, Christie Medical’s general manager and sales/marketing vice president. “The new healthcare landscape is riddle with uncertainty. Implementing technologies like VeinViewer that positively impact patient care does not have to be.”