Outcome and American Heart Association Enhance Patient Management Tool for Get with the Guidelines Program.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Outcome Sciences, Inc. (OUTCOME), the leading provider of patient registries, post-approval studies, quality improvement programs, and integrated technologies for evaluating real-world outcomes, announced today that it has added a Continuity of Care Records (CCR) functionality to the Get With The Guidelines(SM) (GWTG) Patient Management Tool[TM] (PMT) in the areas of Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) Heart Failure and Stroke in cooperation with the American Heart Association.

The CCR is a standard specification being developed jointly by ASTM International, the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS), the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The addition of the CCR to the GWTG CAD, Heart Failure, and Stroke platforms is intended to foster and improve the continuity of patient care, reduce medical errors, and assure at least a minimum standard of health information transportability when a patient is referred or transferred to another provider. The CCR is being developed in response to the need to organize and make transportable a set of basic patient information consisting of the most relevant and timely facts about a patient's condition. These include patient information, patient's health status (e.g., allergies, medications, vital signs, diagnoses, recent procedures), and recent care provided.

OUTCOME'S web-based PMT[TM] for data collection and reporting already plays a key role in the American Heart Association's GWTG programs, empowering healthcare providers to consistently treat patients with the most updated treatment guidelines. This improved PMT[TM] supports the exporting of patient records in the CCR standard XML format. This XML document can be shared electronically with other electronic health record (EHR) systems. Additionally, the PMT[TM] will allow for the CCR to be viewed and printed in PDF format. The patient may receive this document for his/her personal files or to be shared with another clinician responsible for follow-up care.

"The Continuity of Care Records will allow Get With The Guidelines to communicate in-hospital patient data directly to the patient or to their referring physician," said Gregg C Fonarow, M.D., National Chairman of the GWTG Steering Committee and Director of Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center. "As a result, we think this will help improve communications between the physician and patient as well as maximize the patient's quality of care."

"The addition of the Continuity of Care Records to our technology platform will provide a more powerful combination for effective disease management. Providing physicians and patients with the ability to better communicate in the post-acute continuum of care is what we and the AHA hope to accomplish," said Richard Gliklich, MD, President and CEO of OUTCOME. "Our improved PMT with this CCR function bring together important patient data that previously could not be packaged together. We now have the ability to create a complete electronic health record, improving quality for CAD, Heart Failure, and Stroke patients."

About OUTCOME

Outcome is the leading provider of patient registries, post-approval studies, quality improvement programs, and integrated technologies for evaluating real-world outcomes. Outcome provides services and technologies focused on evaluating the safety, effectiveness, and quality of healthcare products and services. The company has designed, developed and managed over one hundred patient registries including many of the largest and most well-recognized programs for disease outcomes and safety/risk management. Outcome is also an AHRQ DEcIDE Research Center. For more information, please visit www.outcome.com.

About American Heart Association

Founded in 1924, the American Heart Association today is the nation's oldest and largest voluntary health organization dedicated to reducing disability and death from diseases of the heart and stroke. These diseases, America's No. 1 and No. 3 killers, and all other cardiovascular diseases claim over 870,000 lives a year. In fiscal year 2005-06 the association invested over $543 million in research, professional and public education, advocacy and community service programs to help all Americans live longer, healthier lives. To learn more, call 1-800-AHA-USA1 or visit americanheart.org.