MedicAlert CTO to Give Opening Remarks at OMG/HL7 Healthcare Interoperability Workshop October 24-27, 2005 - Alexandria, VA.

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- The Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)), today announced that David Harrington, Vice President of Information Technology and CTO, MedicAlert Foundation, will provide the opening remarks at the Healthcare Interoperability workshop. Co-hosted by Health Level 7 (HL7) and sponsored by MedicAlert(R) (http://www.medicalert.org), the workshop will take place October 24-27, 2005 in Alexandria, VA, USA.

Mr. Harrington's opening remarks will cover the importance of interoperability as it relates to electronically linking all members of the patient care team--including physicians, providers, payers and the patient. Each of these stakeholders has vital information regarding the patient's health stored in electronic medical records (EMR), personal health records (PHR), hospital systems, labs, claims databases, and on paper. The goal of interoperability is to provide access to the right information at the right place at the right time while maintaining patient-centered privacy and security.

"MedicAlert has developed a roadmap for implementing this kind of access to healthcare information not just nationwide but globally," said Mr. Harrington. "We hope that the joint OMG/HL7 Workshop on Healthcare Interoperability serves as the kickoff for all stakeholders to move forward with an approach for the adoption of standards-based healthcare information services and interfaces. We recognize that the effective utilization of healthcare information technology is essential to our long-term goals of improving healthcare quality, reducing the cost of healthcare and improving patient safety."

Additional speakers include:

--Abdul-Malik Shakir, Principal Consultant, Shakir Consulting

--Ajay Asthana, Senior Business Architect, IBM

--David Cardenas, Acute Communicable Disease Control, LADHS

--David Hartzband, FutureSense Research

--Dr. Bruce Taffel, Chief Medical Officer, Government Business and Emerging Markets, BCBS Tennessee

--Dr. Frank F. Naemyi-Rad, CEO, Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc.

--Dr. Robert Kolodner, Chief Health Informatics Officer, Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration

--Eric Schripsema, ITI

--George (Woody) Beeler, Beeler Consulting

--Grahame Grieve, CTO, Jiva Medical & HL7 INM Co-Chair

--Janet Marchibroda, CEO, eHealth Initiative Foundation

--Josh Oh, Consultant Architect, EDS

--Kathleen Connors, Fox Systems, Inc.

--Keith Cox, Acting Associate Deputy Director of Health Systems Design and Development, Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration;

--Ken Rubin, Chief Healthcare Architect, EDS Civilian Government & DoD Healthcare Portfolio

--Kenneth Lunn, Head of Comms and Messaging, NHS National Program for IT

--Lenel James, Project Manager, Health Information Technology

--Marius Mikalsen, Research Scientist, Norwegian Joint Medical Service and SINTEF 

--Mary Kratz, University of Michigan Medical School

--Mike Oara, CTO, Relativity Technologies

--Peter van der Grinten, General Manager, dbMotion, Inc.

--Philip Newcomb, CEO, The Software Revolution;

--Plamen Petrov, Chief Enterprise Architect, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association

--Rich DuLaney, IBM

--Rini Verma, Chief Scientific Officer, CAL2CAL

--Russ Hamm, Sr., Programmer/Analyst, Mayo Clinic

--Stale Walderhaug, Research Scientist / Research Fellow, Norwegian Joint Medical Service and SINTEF

--William Branch, Senior Consulting Engineer, CSC

--William Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group Inc.

--Yannick Legre, President, HealthGRID

The OMG invites anyone interested in Healthcare interoperability and vendors to attend. Complete agenda, hotel and registration information is available at http://www.omg.org/hc-pr-i.

About MedicAlert(R)

The MedicAlert Foundation is a nonprofit healthcare informatics organization dedicated to providing services to our members that protect and save lives. MedicAlert(R) services are built around a repository of health information that enables members to manage their personal health records while maintaining security, privacy and confidentiality. As the trusted third party custodian of comprehensive personal health information, the MedicAlert(R) repository can connect to and provide critical medical information between patients, providers, payers, and first responders 24 hours a day anywhere in the world. The premium we place on patient confidentiality has earned the trust of 4 million members and the healthcare community worldwide.

MedicAlert(R) is committed to providing technology-based solutions and is an active member and a leader in developing interoperability standards with all the major Healthcare IT standards organizations. The MedicAlert(R) repository uses web service interfaces to support standard Electronic Health Records (EHRs), including electronic drug prescriptions and for patient record interoperability. These activities will ensure the rapid development and deployment of standards to improve the quality of care, lower healthcare costs while increasing patient safety.

MedicAlert(R) is a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1956 with a mission to protect and save lives, is headquartered in the United States and has international affiliates in nine countries.

Additional information about MedicAlert(R) is available at http://www.medicalert.org

About The OMG

With well-established standards covering software from design and development, through deployment and maintenance, and extending to evolution to future platforms, the Object Management Group (OMG) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration which maximizes ROI, the key to successful IT. OMG's Modeling standards, the basis for the MDA(R), include the Unified Modeling Language(TM) (UML(R)) and Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM(TM)). CORBA(R), the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's standard open platform with hundreds of millions of deployments running today. Headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, the Object Management Group is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry specifications consortium. More information about OMG can be found at www.omg.org.

Note to editors: MDA, Model Driven Architecture, OMG Logo, UML and CORBA are registered trademarks, and OMG, Object Management Group, MOF, MDA Logos, Unified Modeling Language and UML logo are trademarks, of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.