Zargis Medical launches live-streaming version of Telemed platform at ATA

May 28 2010

Zargis Medical Corp., a majority-owned subsidiary of Speedus Corp. (Nasdaq: SPDE), today announced that it launched the live-streaming version of its ZargisTelemed™ platform at last week's American Telemedicine Association Conference (ATA) in San Antonio, TX. The system allows healthcare professionals to share stethoscope sounds in real-time with colleagues located anywhere in the world through the Internet or a private network.  This technology is cleared for sale in the U.S. and 36 other countries.

At ATA, Zargis demonstrated this new system to more than 100 interested healthcare organizations including the U.S. Veterans Health Administration and other U.S. and foreign private and public medical organizations.  Zargis has delivered or is scheduled to deliver trial versions of this system to eight telemedicine groups for evaluation and has also signed a Letter of Intent with one of the larger telemedicine organizations in the world.  This Letter of Intent requests that Zargis deliver sample systems for formal evaluation.  If the results of the evaluation are satisfactory and the terms of the contract are finalized, wide-scale implementation of Zargis' system is expected to take place.

ZargisTelemed allows healthcare professionals to record, view and transmit heart and lung sounds and can be deployed as a turnkey enterprise server or accessed through Zargis' secure server. The platform is designed to support the delivery of cost-effective, expert healthcare to people in remote and rural locations by extending the use of auscultation (listening with a stethoscope) to situations and environments where face-to-face encounters are not always feasible. The system is designed to be accessed from users' PCs and is fully integrated with the award-winning Zargis Cardioscan heart sounds analysis software and the Zargis StethAssist™ heart and lung sounds visualization software.

The U.S. and Europe are the dominant players in the worldwide telemedicine market, which is expected to reach $18 billion by 2015, according to a 2009 report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., a global business strategy company.

"The rapidly-growing demand for streamlined telehealth tools is being driven by rising healthcare costs and the need to deliver care to homebound patients as well as underserved populations in remote and rural areas," stated Zargis CEO John Kallassy. "The ZargisTelemed system offers healthcare practitioners around the world with an efficient and highly cost-effective means to share and store stethoscope sounds in a way that's never before been possible."