Wednesday, December 17, 2008

FDA approves Zoll Medical’s WiFi-enabled defibrillator

By Mass High Tech staff

Resuscitation technology company Zoll Medical Corp. has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market and sell its R-Series Code-Ready clinical defibrillator with a WiFi option, Zoll officials reported. The WiFi option prevents unexpected failure of the defibrillator by signaling to clinicians “when their state of readiness is compromised.” The defibrillator can be run through troubleshooting from a hospital networked computer.

The FDA approved defibrillator also downloads patient data and enables it to be merged wirelessly with the event report.

Zoll Medical (Nasdaq: ZOLL) officials reported a 29 percent jump in revenue and 41 percent increase in profit for fiscal 2008 over the previous fiscal year. For the fiscal year 2008, which closed on Sept. 28, Zoll posted revenue of $398 million, versus 2007 revenues of $309.5 million, and a fiscal 2008 profit of $23.4 million, against $16.66 million in fiscal 2007. According to officials at Zoll, the company’s biggest jump in sales revenue came from the North American hospital market, which increased 37 percent to $117.1 million, versus fiscal 2007 revenue of $85.3 million.