Persistent Systems announced this week that it has helped the Christiana Care Health System, a private healthcare system in the mid-Atlantic states, adopt the caTissue suite, an open source tissue banking repository tool that was developed in the context of the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid.
Persistent said in a statement that it helped Christiana migrate its legacy data and created an interface with the system's current warehouse. For example, the consultants customized the importing of surgical pathology reports into caTissue and also updated the labeling and barcoding scheme so specimen labels can be tailored to users' needs.
Persistent, which is headquartered in Pune, India, also said it ran training programs for all on-site caTissue users including scientists, lab technicians, and support staff.
The company runs a caTissue support center to help users with training, data migration and customization.
Christiana Care serves patients in Delaware and parts of counties that border the state in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey. It has more than 1,000 hospital beds in two hospitals that served over 55,000 patients last year, a cancer center, rehabilitation institute, and 11 affiliated satellite offices with physicians.
"Persistent was integral to the deployment of caTissue at Christiana Care. Persistent brought to the table domain and application specific knowledge, which is essential in deploying applications like caTissue," Rajiv Haravu, senior systems analyst for caBIG at Christiana Care, said in a statement.
Last month Persistent deployed caTissue at the University of Edinburgh's Experimental Cancer Medical Centre [BioInform, May 22, 2009].
In April, Persistent announced it was partnering with the Indiana University School of Informatics to create a research center devoted to life sciences. The Persistent Indiana Research Center has set as a goal to develop software applications for local life science companies as well as collaborate with university researchers [BioInform, April 10, 2008].