OMG Members Demonstrate and Discuss Healthcare Enterprise Solutions; Interoperability Solutions in CORBAmed Booth at HIMSS 2000.

Business/Technology Editors

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 10, 2000

The Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)) announces that over 50 OMG members will exhibit at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference. They will be at HIMSS to show support for the OMG's Healthcare standard specifications, using CORBA(R) and UML(TM) technology as a foundation for distributed applications for healthcare enterprise systems. Many of these members are also active participants in the OMG's Healthcare Task Force, known in the industry as CORBAmed(TM), and will be available in booth #3734 to discuss recent successful deployments of OMG Healthcare and CORBA deployments such as the Government Computer-based Patient Record (GCPR) Framework Project, Baptist Health Systems of South Florida, TeleMed, Total eMed, and the adoption of a national-standard trait set for Person Identification Service (PIDS) in Brazil. The OMG's CORBAmed Task Force booth will also feature interoperability demonstrations highlighting HIPAA-compliance using common service components with international interface standards based on OMG specifications.

"We designed and assembled this year's demonstration to highlight the power of healthcare middleware components in an Internet environment, the true synergy that exists between HL7 and CORBAmed specifications (including a Microsoft client environment) and the extreme leverage of CORBAmed specs towards HIPAA-compliance of legacy environments," explains Jon Farmer, Vice President of Research and Development for Care Data Systems, Inc. who organized the CORBAmed federation demonstration. "In addition, we've organized the demo so that we can easily plug in other vendors' applications and grow the CORBAmed federation in successive HIMSS shows at no cost to new vendors."

About CORBA and Related Projects

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is an open standard that allows the proliferating number of hardware and software applications to interoperate regardless of the programming languages they are written in, the platforms they run on, or where they are located on a network. CORBA is not a healthcare-specific standard. It is a complete, distributed middleware infrastructure and architecture that integrates applications across network, programming language, operating system, and component boundaries. The GCPR project is an excellent example of CORBA's ability to integrate across industry and

geographic boundaries as well as it does across operating system and platform boundaries.

The GCPR Framework Project is a collaborative effort among the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Indian Health Service, and the Department of Defense. The project shows that CORBA and CORBAmed specifications can achieve interoperability among complex heterogeneous information systems in the healthcare domain. As quoted in the March 5, 2000 edition of the Washington Post, Dr. Scott Eyestone, Functional Co-Chair of the OMG's CORBAmed Task Force said, "Private industry is watching very, very closely. If we get to the place where we can digitize health service records at the point of service, and we have an interoperability infrastructure, we can increase the quality of service, control costs, and be effective in preventative health care systems."

CORBA was designed with the enterprise in mind and can be used in all aspects of B2B communication. Enterprise applications based on CORBA are scalable to thousands or more of clients and servers across all computing platforms. Tom Culpepper, Technical Co-Chair of CORBAmed and Senior Architect for 2AB, Inc. stated, "There are vast numbers of legacy systems in the healthcare community, and CORBAmed helps provide them with the ability to migrate to new platforms over time." To find out more about how and where CORBA is used, see www.corba.org.

About CORBAmed

OMG's healthcare domain task force, CORBAmed, is currently working on many new technologies. Some are purely healthcare related, while others relate to the enterprise as a whole. The members of CORBAmed work in concert with healthcare standards groups to eliminate redundancies, take advantage of the best technologies, and incorporate the best available standards. CORBAmed adopted specifications are:

-- Person Identification Service (PIDS)

-- Terminology Query Service (TQS)

-- Clinical Observation Access Service (COAS)

-- Resource Access Decision (RAD)

Current work in process includes:

-- Clinical Image Access Service (CIAS)

-- Medical Transcription Management (MTM)

-- Summary List Management Service (SLiMS)

-- Health Data Interpretation Facility (HDIF)

-- Health Information Locator Service (HILS)

CORBAmed Booth sponsors include 2AB, Adiron, Apelon, Battelle, Care Data Systems, CareFlow|Net, Epic Systems, ESI, Intersystems, Litton/PRC, SAIC, Sentillion, Los Alamos National Labs TeleMed project, MedicaLogic, and Duke University VIRC. For more information about OMG and the work of CORBAmed, visit participating members in booth #3734 at HIMSS, call [phone], or email [e-mail]. The OMG's CORBAmed Web site is www.omg.org/corbamed.

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 and has international marketing offices around the world, along with US-based industry-specific representatives. More information on the OMG and CORBA is available at www.omg.org and www.corba.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), OMG Interface Definition Language(TM), IDL(TM), CORBAservices(TM), CORBAfacilities(TM), CORBAmed(TM), CORBAnet(TM), UML(TM), the UML Cube Logo(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.