Columbus Children's Hospital to add Eclipsys' Sunrise Knowledge-Based Orders to Critical Care solution.

Business Editors

DELRAY BEACH, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 13, 2001

Hospital Among First to Combine Clinical-documentation

Application With Sunrise Knowledge-Based Orders

Eclipsys Corporation(R) (Nasdaq:ECLP), The Outcomes Company(R), today announced that Columbus, OH-based Children's Hospital, a nationally recognized leader in pediatric healthcare services, is implementing Eclipsys' Sunrise Clinical Manager solution -- featuring fully automated Knowledge-Based Orders (KBO) -- throughout the organization.

As part of the implementation, Eclipsys is working with the hospital to combine Clinical Manager and the company's Sunrise Critical Care clinical-documentation solution in the hospital's 22-bed Cardiology unit. The project marks the first step in a major IT initiative by Children's Hospital to further enhance its clinical-information capabilities by adding Clinical Manager's knowledge-driven physician order-entry capabilities to Critical Care's industry-leading documentation functionality throughout the organization.

"As part of the enterprise-wide implementation of Sunrise Clinical Manager throughout Columbus Children's Hospital, Eclipsys is working closely with the hospital to combine Clinical Manager and Sunrise Critical Care in the hospital's Cardiology unit and to measure and quantify how these applications affect quality, costs and outcomes on the unit," said Harvey J. Wilson, Eclipsys chairman and CEO. "We believe that the combination of Clinical Manager's KBO and Critical Care's advanced clinical-documentation capabilities will provide the hospital's physicians and nurses with a powerful new tool for simplifying and enhancing clinical processes -- and thereby improving patient-care and satisfaction outcomes -- throughout the organization."

A long-time user of Sunrise Critical Care, Columbus Children's Hospital has installed Eclipsys' clinical-documentation solution in units containing more than half of its inpatient beds, and hopes to have the application installed enterprise-wide by the end of 2001. "We feel that Critical Care's clinical-documentation capabilities are unparalleled within the industry, and we're committed to implementing this solution throughout all inpatient units of the hospital," said Robert Schwyn, chief information officer at Columbus Children's Hospital. "Because we also believe that Sunrise Clinical Manager's results-reporting and knowledge-based order-entry features offer similarly robust functionality, we're committed to implementing Clinical Manager and combining it with Sunrise Critical Care throughout the organization.

"This project will enable our clinicians to obtain the greatest value from our information system in order to achieve our organization's primary goal -- providing the highest-quality pediatric healthcare services possible," Schwyn added.

The combined use of Sunrise Clinical Manager and Sunrise Critical Care will enable physicians and other clinicians at Children's Hospital to access both applications in an integrated manner. Clinicians will be able to consult Critical Care's continuously updated patient documentation while using Clinical Manager's KBO to order tests and medications electronically, backed by Clinical Manager's real-time and asynchronous clinical decision-support capabilities, which automatically check for and alert caregivers to duplicative orders, drug-drug and drug-food interactions, and other potential problems. As orders and other data are entered in Clinical Manager, they will immediately flow to and populate Critical Care's online patient charts, treatment flowsheets and other documentation features.

Utilization of Clinical Manager and Critical Care together offers clinicians the prospect of an easily accessible, easy-to-use and continuously updated clinical-information system that incorporates robust, seamless order-entry, results-reporting and clinical-documentation functionality. Such integration holds enormous potential benefits for healthcare organizations, including reduced over-utilization of inappropriate tests and procedures, fewer adverse drug events and other medical errors, greater staff productivity and enhanced quality of care.

Further adding to the benefits Columbus Children's will receive by integrating Eclipsys' Clinical Manager and Critical Care solutions, Schwyn reported that the hospital also plans to integrate the WORx pharmacy information management system by Mediware Information Systems, an Eclipsys strategic partner.

Improving quality, reducing errors and costs

Like other Eclipsys customers, Columbus Children's is adding leading-edge Sunrise solutions such as Clinical Manager's KBO as part of an enterprise-wide commitment to improving the quality of patient care while reducing costs as a result of better-coordinated care that helps minimize the possibility of medical errors. These efforts have taken on considerably greater urgency in the last year, spurred by growing concern among healthcare providers and payers about the prevalence of avoidable medical errors in the U.S. healthcare system. In both its initial November 1999 report and the follow-up study released recently, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has brought public attention to the need to dramatically reduce medical errors, noting that "the use of information technology is key" to the success of such initiatives. California has enacted legislation that soon will require all hospitals receiving Medicaid funding to have a computerized physician order-entry system in place, and nearly a dozen other state legislatures are considering similar action. And in November 2000, The Leapfrog Group, a consortium of Fortune 500 leading companies, announced its commitment to establishing a policy under which its members will pay only for healthcare services provided in organizations that use such knowledge-driven systems.

"The key driver for us is quality," Schwyn noted. "While the Eclipsys solutions will help us increase the efficiency of our clinical processes and realize cost savings simply by reducing the duplication of data and work, Columbus Children's Hospital has long been focused on enhancing the quality of the care we provide. The IOM report only validated and intensified our commitment to improving quality. And we know that applications such as Sunrise Clinical Manager's automated knowledge-based orders have been clearly shown to be effective in reducing medical mistakes that are common to manual order-entry systems, such as transcription errors."

Eclipsys customers have documented significant cost and quality benefits from their use of Sunrise Clinical Manager's KBO, which evolved from the knowledge-based BICS system pioneered by Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. A founding member of Boston-based Partners HealthCare System, the Brigham documented a 55% reduction in serious medication errors and an 81% reduction in non-missed dose medication errors overall through use of the BICS system. Clinical Manager is now in use or being implemented in more than 60 healthcare facilities.

Adoption of Clinical Manager also will position Columbus Children's Hospital to leverage and achieve added value from other leading-edge Eclipsys applications currently in use within the organization, including Sunrise Decision Support Manager -- for which Eclipsys provides remote hosting and management support through the company's Technology Solutions Center in Mountain Lakes, NJ -- and Sunrise Record Manager. Clinical Manager not only will serve as the hospital's enterprise-wide clinical data repository for information currently residing on these other Sunrise applications, but also will enable clinicians to more easily access and use information currently stored in other legacy clinical and ancillary systems throughout the organization. These disparate applications from Cerner Corporation, SMS/Siemens and other vendors are used in areas such as Pharmacy, Laboratory, Radiology and Patient Registration.

Sunrise Decision Support Manager provides support for cost accounting, product-line management, departmental budgeting, business development, contract management, resource utilization management and process improvement. Sunrise Record Manager features wide-ranging health information management (HIM) functionality, including comprehensive chart tracking and request, chart completion, release of information, electronic signature and medical record abstracting. Together with Clinical Manager, Critical Care and other available Sunrise products, they comprise the most complete electronic medical record solution available today.

About Columbus Children's Hospital

Serving more than 400,000 patients annually, Columbus Children's Hospital is one of the nation's recognized pediatric leaders, with 313 licensed inpatient beds, 47 leased beds in the Neonatal Intensive and Special Care Units at three local adult hospitals and approximately 11,000 patient admissions each year. Critically-ill children are cared for in Children's Hospital's 45-bed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and 27-bed Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. The hospital's specialty areas include surgical, neurosciences, rehabilitation, burn, dialysis and bone-marrow units. In addition to the main hospital complex, the Children's Hospital campus includes the seven-story Outpatient Care Center, which was recently constructed to house the hospital's ambulatory clinics, outpatient lab, outpatient radiology and outpatient pharmacy, as well as pediatric and surgical specialists' private offices; a six-story Education Building that is home to faculty offices, the Pediatric Residency Training Program, a Clinical Skills Lab, a Computer Instruction Center, the 300-seat Stecker Auditorium, the Grant Morrow Medical Library and the Janet Ortung-Morrow Family Health Information Center; and the Children's Research Institute, a six-story, $20-million facility dedicated to the research of children's diseases. In addition, Children's Hospital offers convenient diagnostic and treatment services at seven Close to Home(TM) Health Care Centers, neighborhood-based primary care at seven Close to Home Physician Care Centers, and home-based care, hospice care and medically fragile daycare services through Children's Homecare. For more information, see the hospital's Web site at www.childrenscolumbus.org.

About Eclipsys

Eclipsys Corporation delivers end-to-end information solutions to more than 1,400 healthcare organizations (HCOs) worldwide. These solutions enable HCOs to balance and improve clinical, financial and satisfaction outcomes. The Eclipsys mission of "better healthcare through information(TM)" aligns with customers' goals and strategies of improving quality and efficiency of care. Sunrise(TM), Eclipsys' comprehensive software line, includes industry-leading integrated clinical, financial, health information, ERP and management information solutions. Sunrise solutions are built on a single, open, modular architecture -- e-healthSOURCE(TM) -- shared by the products of Eclipsys' HEALTHvision affiliate (see www.healthvision.com). In conjunction with HEALTHvision, Eclipsys provides locally branded Web-based customer relationship management solutions to healthcare delivery systems. Sunrise products are complemented by Web-based integration technology, ASP delivery options, wireless access and network solutions, business process reengineering and full IT outsourcing. For more information, see www.eclipsys.com or email [e-mail].

Statements in this news release concerning future results, performance or expectations are forward-looking statements. Because such statements involve risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks include risks described in the filings of Eclipsys with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Eclipsys, Eclipsys Corporation and The Outcomes Company are registered trademarks, and Sunrise, Knowledge-Based Orders and the phrase "better healthcare through information" are trademarks of Eclipsys Solutions Corp. Other product and company names in this news release are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.