CareScience Unveils CMS Quality Manager, a Core Component of the Care Management Suite.

PHILADELPHIA -- CMS Quality Manager will be Showcased at Institute for Health Care Improvement National Forum in Orlando December 13-15

CareScience, a division of Quovadx, Inc. (Nasdaq:QVDX) providing care management, clinical analysis and regional health information data sharing solutions for hospitals and healthcare systems, today announced the general availability of its CMS Quality Manager solution. CMS Quality Manager, a key component of the company's Care Management Suite, automates the process of clinical data gathering, analysis and reporting for healthcare providers. The updated solution is currently deployed at several client sites and will be demonstrated at the CareScience booth at the Institute for Health Care Improvement (IHI) National Forum held at the Orlando World Marriott Resort and Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., from December 13-15, 2004.

CMS Quality Manager is the next generation of the Care Management System, CareScience's flagship product. CMS Quality Manager consolidates patients' clinical and financial data into a single repository for centralized access and analysis. Clinical data is then easily accessed via a Web-based interface for both populations and individual patients, thereby limiting the need for a time-consuming paper chart review and allowing for a broader, more efficient and accurate review of hospital processes and physician care. CMS Quality Manager also applies a clinically focused risk assessment to all data, allowing users to understand how unique conditions and characteristics impact patient populations and outcomes. For example, CareScience methodologies can help predict the total number of complications in a patient population and determine the percentage of patients that experienced a severe or catastrophic complication.

"CareScience has been an integral part of our performance measurement and analysis for nearly two years, and we are pleased to serve as a design partner for the CMS Quality Manager solution," said Christine Lombardi, director of Case Management and Performance Improvement, Middle Tennessee Medical Center, an Ascension affiliated healthcare facility. "We look forward to putting the CMS Quality Manager to use in furthering our care management improvement goals. CareScience has allowed us to both improve the quality of care we provide, as well as reduce the costs and amount of labor involved with regulatory reporting and quality of care analysis."

The CareScience Care Management Suite is an ASP-based solution that leverages cutting-edge research, methods and technology to help hospitals and health systems improve quality, care management and clinical performance. Coupled with CareScience's expert consulting and mentoring services, the solution helps healthcare providers to access and analyze information about patient care practices, physician and facility performance, care processes, resources and outcomes.

"CareScience Care Management Suite has allowed us to affect positive improvements in the quality of care we can provide to our patients through cost-effective process improvements," said Valerie Crafts, project leader, Quality Management, Borgess Medical Center. "CareScience consultants have been instrumental in training our analytics team, providing us with support through every step of the reporting process, ensuring that we reap the greatest possible benefit from our data analysis and outcome measurement."

CareScience clients use the Care Management Suite to analyze their clinical performance and, in turn, to improve clinical outcomes and efficiency. All the tools in the Care Management Suite leverage CareScience's proprietary, statistical methodologies for risk adjustment, developed at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine and Wharton School of Business. This methodology allows for greater breadth, control and comprehensiveness of data analysis and outcome measurement. Special features and enhancements in the new CMS Quality Manager include:

--Quick Reports and enhanced reporting features to provide more detailed information, including integration with Core Measure data, instant report editing capabilities and expanded report selection criteria availability for all report types.

--Advanced, reusable templates, or profiles, including template publication and creation of "favorites" or sub-groups and categories for patient populations or criteria, which improves ease-of-use and the ability to accurately share reports with various stakeholders.

--Enhanced flexible selection criteria, including the ability to select across diagnosis or procedure type, to select resources for patient selection via internal codes or a universal medical terminology and to define exclusionary patient criteria from a population. For example, patients with congestive heart failure who received ACE inhibitors, but did not receive beta blockers, or heart attack patients with a PTCA, but with no stent, can be selected using multiple criteria. This flexibility allows for greater customization of reports and improved analysis of results.

Other Care Management tools currently include:

--CMS National Comparatives allow users to compare outcomes, treatment patterns and resource use against the CareScience national database.

--CMS Core Measures is a module that, when integrated with CMS Quality Manager, can make data abstraction for accreditation reporting faster, easier and more flexible.

"We are pleased to deliver CMS Quality Manager, the next generation of our care management solution, and a key component in the Care Management Suite," commented Tom Zajac, president, CareScience.

"This product is the result of a collaborative effort with our customers, defining the needs and realities of today's healthcare requirements. CMS Quality Manager improves upon the most critical features of our flagship Care Management System to help users reap the greatest possible benefits from their clinical and financial data, while streamlining personnel and financial resources applied to an integrated care management process."

Demonstrations of CMS Quality Manager will be available at the CareScience booth, number 700, at the IHI National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care. The National Forum is focused on improving healthcare, drawing approximately 4,000 healthcare leaders from around the world and 6,000 participants via satellite. The exhibition Hall, located in the Crystal Ballroom at the Orlando World Center Marriot, will be open Monday, December 13 from 3:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m., Tuesday, December 14 from 8:00 a.m. - 6:30 p.m., and Wednesday, December 15 from 8:00 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.

CareScience has begun migrating existing Care Management System customers to the new CMS Quality Manager solution, and is targeting full roll out for completion by mid-year 2005. The product will be integral to all new CareScience customer implementations moving forward.

About CareScience

CareScience, a division of Quovadx, Inc. (Nasdaq:QVDX), is one of the nation's leading providers of care management services and analytical solutions to hospitals and health systems, and a pioneer in community-wide clinical data exchange. CareScience supplies the people and technology to ensure that high-quality care is delivered, throughout the healthcare system, through clinical data access and clinical process transformation. For more information, please visit www.carescience.com.