OMG Announces Winner of the Homer R. Warner Healthcare Interoperability Award; Recognition of Excellence in Implementing Interoperability Standards in Healthcare.

Business/Technology Editors

NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 2001

Today at the 2001 HIMSS Annual Conference, the Object Management Group Healthcare Domain Task Force (DTF) announced the winner and runner-up of the Homer R. Warner Healthcare Interoperability Award. This award is given in recognition of organizations providing excellence in the implementation of interoperability standards, including OMG's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (R) (CORBA(R)) and the Unified Modeling Language (TM) (UML(TM)), in the field of healthcare.

Presented this morning by Dr. Richard Dick, president of Nex2 and OMG Healthcare DTF member, the award was given to McKessonHBOC, a supply management and healthcare information technology company. The submission made by Express Scripts was the runner-up in the competition.

The winning product, McKessonHBOC's Horizon(WP) Passport, incorporates the following two OMG Healthcare standards, Personal Identification Service (PIDS) and CORBA. In the application's role as the Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI), person data is integrated from patient data found in a variety of disparate hospital and physician information system databases, to provide a single person identification capability through the OMG Healthcare DTF standard, PIDS and HL7 interfaces. Additionally, Horizon(WP) Passport provides a Web-enabled GUI interface for direct EMPI access to functions of person search, add and update, as well as, system administration functions.

Horizon(WP) Passport was chosen for the award because it possessed excellence in the following areas:

--Leveraging Open Standards

--Interoperability of Information and Functionality

--Commercial Viability

--Leadership

--Impact on Healthcare Delivery

"Winning OMG's Homer R. Warner Award indicates that McKessonHBOC's investment in adopting industry standards for its applications is succeeding," said Graham King, president of McKessonHBOC's Information Technology Business. "We are particularly honored to receive an award that signifies excellence in the implementation of OMG interoperability standards. This demonstrates that our open enterprise applications add value to existing legacy applications, which extends our customers' return on investment."

"OMG's 1997 transformation into a full-service standards organization, serving up not only infrastructure standards but directly addressing the needs of the healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing and other industries, has been a raging success," said Richard Soley, chairman and CEO of OMG. "By depending on OMG's healthcare standards, McKessonHBOC and Express Scripts and many other organizations offer their customers ease of integration and a way to drive down long-term maintenance costs. OMG congratulates the winners for their fine products and their choice of standards."

This first annual OMG award is named after Homer R. Warner, MD, PhD, founder of the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah. Considered to be a pioneer in the field of Medical Informatics, his formal training was in Internal Medicine/Physiology. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences; Former editor of the journal "Computers and Biomedical Research"; Past President, American College of Medical Informatics; and is currently a Professor of Emeritus in the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. His primary interest is in rearranging medical knowledge to better serve the learning and practice needs of physicians and students.

For more information on OMG and OMG's Healthcare DTF, please visit www.omg.org; www.omg.org/healthcare/.

About The OMG

With the support of its membership of software vendors, software developers and end users, the OMG's CORBA is "The Middleware That's Everywhere(TM)." Since 1989, the OMG has been "Setting The Standards For Distributed Computing(TM)" through its mission to promote the theory and practice of object technology for the development of distributed computing systems. The goal is to provide a common architectural framework for object-oriented applications based on widely available interface specifications. The OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, with an office in Tokyo, Japan as well as international marketing offices in Bahrain, Germany, India, and the UK, along with a U.S. government representative in Washington, DC, USA. The OMG is also a major sponsor of the Integrate 2001 trade show and conference, which will be held September 19-21, 2001 in New York City.

For information on joining the OMG or additional information, please contact OMG headquarters by phone at [phone], by fax at [phone], or by email at [e-mail]. The OMG provides current information and services for Distributed Object Computing through The Information Brokerage(R) on the World Wide Web at www.omg.org and at www.corba.org. Information about OMG Japan can be found at www.omgj.org.

Note to editors: CORBA(R), The Information Brokerage(R), CORBA Academy(R), IIOP(R) and the Object Management Group logo(R) are registered trademarks of the Object Management Group. OMG(TM), Object Management Group(TM), the CORBA Logo(TM), ORB(TM), Object Request Broker(TM), the CORBA Academy logo(TM), XMI(TM), MOF(TM), CWM(TM), OMG Interface Definition Language(TM), IDL(TM), CORBAservices(TM), CORBAfacilities(TM), CORBAmed(TM), CORBAnet(TM), UML(TM), the UML Cube Logo(TM), "We're Known By The Companies We Connect(TM)" and Unified Modeling Language(TM) are trademarks of the Object Management Group. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.