CA'S UNICENTER TNG UNDERPINS VIRTUAL HEALTH INFORMATION NETWORK.

ISLANDIA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--February 18, 1997--

The Clinical Connection System Will Track Patient Records And Improve Nationwide Movement Of Medical Information

Led by a Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) Premier Business Partner, an alliance of leading technology companies today announced the formation of a virtual health information network (VHIN) extensively managed by CA's Unicenter TNG enterprise management software. Integrate IT!, Inc., an Atlanta-based solutions provider for the health care industry, has specified Unicenter TNG for the deployment and management of the fully networked clinical information delivery system.

The goal of the Clinical Connection system is to provide a fully networked clinical management solution that meets the health care industry's need to share information in a way that increases efficiency, lowers the cost of care, offers centralized management of resources, and improves quality of patient care.

The system captures and communicates both clinical and financial information. Health care professionals and administrators can use the network to quickly locate and access patient records on decentralized databases across physician offices, hospitals and special care facilities. The Clinical Connection helps automate and speed case management, benefit coordination, authorization, referral, and prescriptive maintenance across the continuum of health care, from the patient's bedside to the physician's office and every point in between.

Given the distributed and multi-platform character of The Clinical Connection, unprecedented systems management issues had to be resolved. For that reason, the architects of The Clinical Connection selected Unicenter TNG to provide the centralized management necessary to make the VHIN possible.

"We recognize Unicenter TNG's industry-leading role in enterprise management," said Joseph Pufahl, Integrate IT!'s executive vice president and chief operating officer. "Unicenter TNG provides the best single-point enterprise management system, particularly for the fragmented health care environment."

The alliance chose CA's enterprise management architecture over offerings from several other vendors. "We partnered with CA because we wanted a technology that would suit the diverse needs of our health care partners," Pufahl added. In addition to CA, VHIN alliance business partners include IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, and Microsoft.

Unicenter TNG delivers a rich set of management functions, which are built on top of an object-oriented, open architecture and a highly scalable, manager/agent framework. It provides comprehensive end-to-end enterprise management for UNIX, Windows NT, AS/400, NetWare and mainframe platforms. Using scalable manager/agent technology, Unicenter TNG allows organizations to manage production environments through its integrated policy-based management infrastructure, common management applications and consistent graphical user interface. Unicenter TNG is a fully integrated management solution covering security, storage, workload, software distribution, help desk, performance, and change management for traditional distributed computing environments as well as the Internet and Intranets.

The next-generation VHIN, based on distributed client/server computing, allows physicians and hospitals to maintain ownership of patient records, and protects their investments in existing clinical databases and health information systems. The architecture for the Clinical Connection is anticipated to be available in early 1998. A full nationwide implementation may exist in five to 10 years.

"This endeavor is highly ambitious, almost visionary in its conception," said Henry Morris, research director for applications and information access at IDC in Framingham, Mass. "The Clinical Connection is far-reaching in terms of its level of aggregating medical information up and down the various levels of the health care delivery system."

According to Morris, deploying a network that cuts across as many entrenched interests as does The Clinical Connection, creates numerous challenges, both technical and organizational. "Of these, the developers seem to have a better handle on the technical challenges," said Morris. "The alliance has done a good job of lining up the technical resources and building the partnerships among the various technical providers to create a seamless system."

The more challenging issue for The Clinical Connection is to navigate the tugs and pulls represented by entrenched interests at each level of the health care system. "The ability to build this network and pull it off depends on the alliance's success in foreseeing the interdependencies at each level, managing the data interfaces at the many different points represented by the health care system, and securing the endorsements and collaborations required to give the program long-term credibility," said Morris.

Key attributes of the Clinical Connection include:

- A national framework for the secure and confidential tracking of patient records across health care providers, insurance carriers, and employers.

- The ability for managed care providers to establish a flow of information with member health care facilities.

- The ability for physicians to automatically match the patient with the appropriate health plan, including data about medications, tests and referrals to specialists eligible for insurance coverage.

Members of the Clinical Connection alliance include:

GTE Data Services - will deliver telecommunications capabilities, WAN support, help desk function, and manage the national indexing system for locating and retrieving clinical and financial data. GTE Data Services is one of the largest software development, systems and network integrators, and information processing companies in the U.S. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of GTE, one of the largest publicly-held telecommunications companies in the world. GTE is the largest U.S.-based telephone company, as well as a leading provider of cellular communication services. GTE Data Services is based in Tampa, Fla.

Integrate IT!, Inc. - will provide software applications that collect and disseminate clinical information at the point of care, as well as compile data for the management of health care cost and resource utilization, clinical quality, primary and preventive health care, and patient satisfaction. Integrate It! sells and supports a range of software for the health care industry. Integrate IT! is based in Atlanta, Ga.

Symbol Technologies - will make available mobile wireless input devices for physician use at point-of-care, as well as "smart" cards carried by the insured for use in tracking patient data and benefits eligibility information. Symbol Technologies is the world leader in bar code-driven data transaction systems with an installed base of more than 4 million scanners and hand-held computers. Symbol Technologies is based in Holtsville, NY.

Through the services of Unicenter TNG, The Clinical Connection takes advantage of systems management benefits including:

Centralized, End-to-End Management - Administrators can manage the network with a single solution that encompasses heterogeneous networks, systems, applications, desktops and databases.

Real World Interface - To enable health care workers to deal with highly-complex IT infrastructures, Unicenter TNG provides a Real World Interface, utilizing 3-D animation and visualization to depict the network infrastructure, making IT management much more intuitive. Business Process Views - A complex system presents an overwhelming amount of management data to system administrators. Using the Real World Interface, users may select from a collection of automatically discovered objects that represent what is really important to their work, such as a particular host, printer or application. Business Process Views enable administrators to deal with only those IT resources that impact each business process.

Security - Given the confidential nature of the information carried by The Clinical Connection, a comprehensive level of security is required. Security management requires bringing together various issues such as multi-platform authentication, authorization and auditing into one easily manageable solution. With single sign-on, users need to sign-on only once for access to all authorized systems, eliminating the need to remember different user IDs and passwords for every system.

Event/Status/Exception Management - Possibly the single most time consuming task in operations is managing exception events. Unicenter TNG offers a unique solution to this problem. Because it can correlate and filter events from all different types of IT resources, it can pinpoint the root cause of a problem. In addition, intelligent agents can filter and correlate local problems and take corrective action locally. Managers can also correlate events forwarded to them from different agents, and apply their own filtering and correlation rules. They can then direct the agents to take corrective action, across multiple platforms and multiple types of resources.

Storage Management - A key challenge in ensuring the reliability of information is providing the ability to recover information lost during a disaster. Another is the cost-efficient management of storage. These two challenges are addressed by Unicenter TNG's storage management functions.

Software Delivery - The costs of manually delivering, installing, and administering software in a system such as The Clinical Connection would be overwhelming. Unicenter TNG's software delivery function provides flexible and scalable delivery, installation, and configuration of software - both shrink-wrapped and in-house - across heterogeneous environments.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), with headquarters in Islandia, N.Y., is the world leader in mission-critical business software. The company develops, licenses and supports more than 500 integrated products that include enterprise computing and information management, application development, manufacturing and financial applications. CA has over 9,000 people in 130 offices in 40 countries and had revenue of $3.9 billion in calendar year 1996. CA can be reached by visiting http://www.cai.com on the World Wide Web, emailing [e-mail] or calling 1-516-342-5224.

Integrate IT!, Inc. provides software applications that collect and disseminate clinical information at the point of care, as well as compile data for the management of primary and preventive health care cost and resource utilization, clinical quality, health care and patient satisfaction. Integrate IT! markets a variety of software solutions to support hospital and clinical management, physicians' offices, and managed care practices. More information on Integrate IT! and The Clinical Connection is available at the Integrate IT!, Inc. Web site at www.integrateit.com. Or, contact Integrate IT! at Suite 310, 1000 Abernathy Rd., Atlanta, GA 30328 or 1-770-395-9600.

All referenced product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

CONTACT: Computer Associates

Sean O'Neill, 516/342-4130

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