Fairview Health Services Goes "Live" With STC's Universal Index Solution to Integrate Seven Hospitals and Two Dozen Clinics.

MONROVIA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 10, 1999--

Fairview's "Enterprise Index" Integrates 2.5 Million Records

Across Extensive Health-Care Network

Software Technologies Corp. (STC), the leading provider of enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions, Wednesday announced that Fairview Health Services has gone live with Universal Index(tm) (UI), STC's enterprisewide master person index (EMPI) solution, to integrate its cross-facility information systems.

As a result, Fairview's extensive network of seven hospitals and 24 clinics successfully connected 2.5 million patient and member records, enabling real-time access to information, helping to improve patient care.

Fairview's "Enterprise Index" went live on Monday, Jan. 18. The integration incorporates the Fairview University Medical Center, Riverside Campus, Fairview Ridges in Burnsville, Fairview Southdale in Edina, Fairview Northland in Princeton, Riverside part of the FUMC entity, and 24 Institute for Athletic Medicine (IAM) clinics.

At Fairview, STC's UI translates and assigns a global identifier to every patient and member record. The system establishes a unified approach for tracking clinical data, minimizing the pitfalls associated with controlling multiple MPIs.

"STC's UI has enabled Fairview to identify the same patient previously known to our corporation under separate identification numbers and, in doing so, established a `super list' of all patients that were otherwise tracked through multiple, proprietary applications," said Ben Dierken, Fairview EA project director.

"Fairview looks forward to using UI as a quality-improvement tool for our master patient indexes. It constantly watches out for and reports potential duplicates, which helps ensure continuous improvement in the accuracy and completeness of the patient lists," Dierken added.

Presently, many health-care organizations consider the integration of clinical records a top-tier priority. "Traditionally, health-care enterprises have been able to manage their local MPI with their existing legacy applications, and using vendors like ALTA, have been able to cleanse their data and reduce duplication," said James T. Demetriades, president, chairman and chief executive officer of STC.

"The Universal Index greatly simplifies this process by allowing disparate systems to share a single identifier for each member or person throughout the enterprise. Our work with Fairview demonstrates the power of the Universal Index to rapidly and seamlessly integrate and leverage existing disparate systems across the continuum of care," Demetriades added.

Fairview Healthcare, based in Minneapolis, comprises seven hospitals, 37 primary-care clinics and 39 specialty-care clinics. The hospital is ranked among the nation's best 100 hospitals as reported by the U.S. News and World Report.

Fairview recently acquired the administrative responsibilities of hospital and clinic facilities formerly run by the University of Minnesota. Both organizations had closed, in-house-built databases to handle patient processing.

Fairview's challenge is to move off a non-Y2K-compliant system (Unisys) and split the patient processing tasks into two applications, PASS (Fairview's existing system), and IDX (U of M's scheduling/workflow application), so that both could access a single Master Patient Index (MPI).

STC's UI meets the challenge as a back-end system that integrates and manages data coming in from two separate systems and makes it accessible through one unique identifier or MPI.

STC is widely recognized as a leader in enterprise application integration, with particular expertise in integrating health-care delivery systems. STC's Universal Index provides an integrated delivery system with an enterprisewide master person index (EMPI).

Universal Index provides one shared index with identification and demographic information for all individuals who interact with the enterprise. The Universal Index ensures that users always get the most recent information regardless of which department or facility performs the service.

About Fairview

Fairview is a community-focused health system providing a complete range of services from prevention of illness and injury to care for the most complex medical conditions. Fairview is a not-for-profit organization with headquarters in Minneapolis and staff and facilities throughout Minneapolis and Western Wisconsin.

About STC

Software Technologies Corp. is the leading installed provider of enterprise application integration (EAI) technology, providing real-time or batch enterprise-integration of applications, databases and legacy systems.

DataGate, the premier integration product suite, is currently installed in more than 1,000 sites worldwide. DataGate supports multiple messaging capabilities, including data conversion, translation, transformation, encryption monitoring and routing.

DataGate also supports electronic-data interchange (EDI) and SAP R/3, and offers international standards compliance, including S.W.I.F.T., EDIFACT, AL3, HL7 and X12. STC's Universal Solutions provide health-care systems with flexible enterprisewide systems that can be rapidly deployed to support the growing requirements of their Integrated Delivery Systems.

The Universal Index, Universal Registration and Universal Results Reporting systems make up the solution suite. In addition to its product line, STC offers a full range of professional services including consulting, training and support. Software Technologies Corporation has headquarters in Monrovia, with offices in North America, Europe and the Pacific Rim.

Additional information about STC and its products is available on the company's Web site at http://www.stc.com or by calling 626/471-6000.

Note to Editors: DataGate and Universal Index are registered trademarks of STC.