Northwest Community Healthcare Deploys CA's Unicenter TNG to Monitor Systems Serving Healthcare Staff and Patients.

ISLANDIA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 6, 1999--

Unicenter TNG Handles Y2K Inventory And Offers Extensive Capabilities

For Desktop Management In 21st Century

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that Northwest Community Healthcare (Northwest Community), a provider of comprehensive medical services in northwest suburban Chicago, has selected CA's Unicenter TNG to manage the multi-platform networks that support its system, which includes a hospital campus and several community-based treatment locations.

As the delivery of health care becomes more dependent on the network and the infrastructure that supports it, medical facilities are taking steps to ensure the long-term health of their systems. Northwest selected Unicenter TNG to provide integrated tracking for its network assets and to manage the highly distributed system from a central location.

"Northwest Community Healthcare has built its reputation on providing state of the art medical services to our patients," said Suresh Krishnan, Northwest Community's director of IT infrastructure. "With the implementation of Unicenter TNG, the physicians, nurses and administrators who serve our patients will be assured that the computer network and applications they depend upon will meet our highest standards of reliability and functionality."

Northwest Community's most immediate challenge was part of the institution's overall Year 2000 readiness initiative. While testing for large systems and networks was well under way, the hospital needed to quickly inventory desktop systems to assure Y2K readiness. The organization is committed to taking every precaution to avoid system failures due to Year 2000 date issues.

IT professionals at Northwest Community concluded that Unicenter TNG's ability to quickly assess the Y2K compliance of PC-based hardware and software throughout the enterprise would provide an immediate return-on-investment.

Long term, Northwest Community will take advantage of Unicenter TNG's cross-platform capabilities to manage a network of Windows NT, NetWare, UNIX and VMS servers. Northwest Community plans to incorporate the event management capabilities of Unicenter TNG across all its server platforms to help assure the reliability of the network the healthcare organization's staff depends on to provide care to patients.

Within the first month of deploying Unicenter TNG, Northwest Community realized significant savings in human resources. "If we did not have Unicenter TNG, we would have had to hire additional technicians to physically check the Y2K compatibility of hardware and software on 1,200 PC desktop installations," said Krishnan. "Instead, we are now able to gather that data automatically."

With the Year 2000 desktop system inventory almost completed, Northwest Community is employing Unicenter TNG's remote software delivery services to download and update software on its networked PCs. Remote management and maintenance of desktop systems is another way Unicenter TNG will help Northwest Community increase the productivity of help desk and IT staff while reducing costs.

"Unicenter TNG desktop management capabilities allows our help desk staff to not only deploy software but to do most of their troubleshooting without leaving their desks," said Krishnan. "This Unicenter TNG capability also maximizes the productivity of the help desk without requiring additional staff."

Northwest Community is also deploying the Unicenter TNG integration kit with Cisco Systems' Cisco Works to provide automated help desk functionality to monitor its network. Central monitoring will extend to network software and hardware such as switches, hubs, and routers, minimizing downtime on patient systems.

"Our help desk will be able monitor the status of the network and escalate calls to the network management group more efficiently," said Krishnan. "Before Unicenter TNG was installed, end users detected a problem and alerted the help desk. With Unicenter TNG, the help desk can often detect a problem before the end user is even aware of it. In many cases, the problem can be remedied before the user experiences any difficulties."

Eventually, Krishnan plans to go beyond troubleshooting to use Unicenter TNG to proactively performance tune the way applications run on the network. "Long term, we want to look into monitoring the performance of applications," he said.

Northwest Community relies on health information systems from Shared Medical Systems (SMS), Malvern, PA, including NOVIUS(R) Scheduling and applications to support patient care, patient management, and accounting. SMS offers Unicenter TNG-based remote services to manage a health organization's desktop, network and server environment. SMS, a premier Unicenter TNG reseller, offered a solution that leveraged their knowledge and experience with Unicenter TNG.

Future plans call for Northwest Community to bring more and more of its application software under Unicenter TNG management. The next step is to enable the hospital to monitor the performance of its strategic PeopleSoft applications.

For more 40 years, Northwest Community Healthcare has served the needs of those who live and work in Chicago's northwest suburbs. The organization's Arlington Heights campus includes Northwest Community Hospital, a Day Surgery Center and a Wellness Center. In addition, Northwest Community Healthcare operates three 24-hour Treatment Centers in the suburbs of Buffalo Grove, Lake Zurich and Schaumburg, as well as several physician office buildings in the northwest suburbs.

With an expert medical staff of 700 physicians, as well as a highly skilled nursing and allied health professionals staff, Northwest Community offers an extensive range of services recognized for excellence. These include cardiology, cancer care, family medicine, home healthcare, orthopedics and women's and children's services. More information is available at the Northwest Community Healthcare World Wide Web address: http://www.nch.org.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), the world leader in mission-critical business computing, provides software, support and integration services in more than 100 countries around the world. CA has more than 13,000 employees and had revenue of $5.1 billion in calendar year 1998. For more information about CA, please call 516-342-5224 or email [e-mail]. CA's World Wide Web address is www.cai.com.

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