Clinical laboratories know full well that patients do not like being stuck by needles. And hospital administrators know that increasing the hospital’s patient-satisfaction scores is important for Medicare hospital accreditation. This is why hospital administrators are devoting more attention—and budget dollars—to products that have the potential to reduce the pain experienced by patients. And patient satisfaction surveys...

Laboratories in an increasing number of U. S. hospitals and healthcare systems are seeing significantly lower hemolysis rates in the blood specimens their staff are collecting with new technology designed for drawing blood with a single-use, sterile device that advances into the vein through a peripheral IV (PIV). The technology, PIVO (Velano Vascular, San Francisco, California), is a needle-free blood collection device that attaches to a PIV and is used as an alternative to venipunctures...

San Francisco medical device company Velano Vascular closed a $25 million second round of financing, bringing its total overall to $50 million. The new capital will go toward expanding its needle-less blood draw device and to developing new technologies. CEO Eric Stone would not reveal what these new technologies will entail but said they will fall within the company’s mission of reducing the costs and risk of infections associated with blood draws.

For most of us, getting blood drawn is an unpleasant, but necessary, part of life. For others, though, it's extremely risky, if not impossible. Those people have what is known as difficult venous access (DVA), and they can include children, people witjh chronic illnesses, the elderly and people with diabetes, among others. Velano Vascular is a company that has developed a way to draw blood in the hospital that isn't invasive; rather than using a needle, Velano's technology, called PIVO, allows practitioners to use the peripheral IV...

Velano Vascular has closed on $25 million in funding that will help the company advance its goal of transforming how blood is drawn from hospital patients. The company’s chief product is called the PIVO. The FDA-approved device allows providers to draw blood through an already-inserted catheter rather than use a fresh needle.

Centura Health, the region’s health care leader, went live across 17 hospitals in offering needle-free blood draws for inpatients using the PIVO™ device from Velano Vascular. “This new technology is changing the face of how patients experience hospital care,” says Dawn Bloemen, Centura Health’s Emerging Technology Analyst. Blood draws are such a common component of a hospital stay, the associated trauma to patients has largely been overlooked – and while the results inform 70% of all clinical decisions, there has been little innovation in this procedure or related technologies in decades.