Claredi Selects Lee Barrett as CEO; Company Charts New Course Related to NHII.

SALT LAKE CITY -- Claredi, the nation's premier health care EDI interoperability solutions provider, announced today that industry-leader Lee Barrett has joined the firm in the position of chief executive officer. This move bolsters Claredi's leadership position in the health care market and signals the advent of a significant new strategic initiative related to the industry's development of a national health information infrastructure supplementing its HIPAA implementation solutions.

"Claredi has always been fortunate in hiring gifted and experienced people who clearly understand the nature of health care EDI and e-Health, and Lee Barrett is no exception," said Dr. Kepa Zubeldia, Claredi's founder and president. "There are very few people in the industry who combine Lee's comprehensive knowledge of the key stakeholders with the ability to see not only where the industry is heading, but also provide the vision to understand where it needs to go and how it can get there. His intelligence, energy and very successful record in a wide variety of e-Health initiatives will ensure Claredi's leadership position for years to come."

With the addition of Barrett to the Claredi team, Zubeldia will be refocusing his own efforts in the areas of product strategy and development. He will also remain active and involved in the various standards development organizations and industry bodies in which he has participated from the early days of health care electronic data exchange.

Barrett brings more than 25 years of experience in the payer marketplace including: Travelers, Aetna, Mass Mutual and others, and has led national health care consulting practices for Covansys, SAIC and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Most recently he was CEO of the Medical Banking Exchange LLC, a leading provider-focused entity in the medical banking field.

Barrett has further served the industry in a variety of positions including chair of the ASC X12N Insurance Subcommittee while it developed all of the HIPAA adopted transactions; chair of Workgroup for EDI (WEDI) and executive director of the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC). He also serves on the board of directors of the American Dental Association Business Enterprises Inc. (ADABEI). He regularly speaks at national conferences on e-Health and HIPAA, and is considered a leading expert on these topics. He stated about joining the Claredi team, "I am excited and look forward to the challenge of working to leverage the leadership position that Claredi has achieved in the health care market, and to enhance their product suite of offerings in the e-Health sector working to promulgate the NHII and other key industry initiatives."

About Claredi

Claredi is a Salt Lake City-based company that pioneered the concept of transaction validation under HIPAA and counts more than 1,200 major health care organizations among their customers -- payers, providers, clearinghouses and vendors. The company's transaction validation methodology has received the exclusive endorsement of the American Hospital Association. Today, Claredi provides comprehensive EDI solutions to enable health care organizations to achieve practical interoperability with all of their trading partners, and to more efficiently manage the ongoing evolution of their health care transactions. For more information, visit http://www.claredi.com.