LAKE FOREST, Ill., June 29, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ --

Hospira (NYSE: HSP), a leading provider of clinical information and medication delivery technologies, today announced its support for North Carolina's new law establishing a statewide surveillance and reporting system for 14 specified healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). The legislation, known as the Model Healthcare-Associated Infections Law, is effective today and institutions have until Dec. 31 to comply with its provisions. It specifies rules for a statewide reporting and surveillance system emphasizing a particular preference for electronic surveillance. The legislation is supported by the North Carolina Hospital Association, the North Carolina Division of Public Health and healthcare facilities throughout the state.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20040503/HSPLOGO)

"We are pleased to be part of this improvement in infection control and standardized reporting methods for North Carolina," said Hugh Tilson, senior vice president, North Carolina Hospital Association. "We are confident that this legislation will build on all of the work we are doing to improve the quality of care and reduce infection rates throughout the state."

These soon-to-be required reporting and surveillance systems help prevent the occurrence of major patient safety hazards like HAIs, adverse drug events and antimicrobial resistant infections. These have been linked to increased morbidity and mortality, and have an enormous financial impact on both healthcare institutions and society at large. For example, an estimated 1.7 million patients develop an HAI in the United States each year, and 99,000 die as a result, adding $28 billion to $33 billion in healthcare costs annually.(1)

The state of Pennsylvania passed a similar law in 2007, with very positive results. After implementing the reporting program for HAIs, which also requires use of electronic clinical surveillance systems to track and report infections, the Pennsylvania Department of Health reported a 12.5 percent reduction in HAIs in the state's acute-care hospitals in 2009.(2)

In North Carolina, several facilities have preemptively adopted electronic clinical surveillance systems, such as Hospira's TheraDoc™ platform, which interface with a number of data sources to provide near real-time, actionable information to help identify infections sooner, improve efficiency and workflow and allow clinicians more time for patient interventions, HAI improvements and education.

"We implemented electronic clinical surveillance software in February 2010 and have seen improved efficiency in surveillance and tracking of healthcare-associated infections," explained Robin Carver, director of infection prevention, WakeMed Health & Hospitals, in Raleigh, North Carolina. "The system has allowed WakeMed clinicians to spend more time on HAI education and prevention and less time on data collection and reporting."

"This new legislation will help support Hospira's focus on reducing HAIs and other adverse patient events at healthcare facilities across the United States, helping to improve patient safety, reduce healthcare costs and increase care quality," added France Pitera, vice president, Clinical Information Technology, Hospira.

About The TheraDoc Clinical Surveillance Platform
TheraDoc systems are actively used in more than 300 U.S. hospitals, making critical patient information and medical knowledge readily available to help clinicians intervene quickly, prescribe appropriately and improve the quality of patient care, as well as facilitate reporting of HAIs via the NHSN. The TheraDoc clinical surveillance platform is the engine that powers several knowledge modules, including the Infection Control Assistant™, Antibiotic Assistant™, ADE Assistant™, Clinical Alerts Assistant™ and Anticoagulation Assistant™. For more information about TheraDoc, visit http://www.theradoc.com or call (801) 415-4400.

About Hospira
Hospira, Inc. is a global specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery company dedicated to Advancing Wellness™. As the world leader in specialty generic injectable pharmaceuticals, Hospira offers one of the broadest portfolios of generic acute-care and oncology injectables, as well as integrated infusion therapy and medication management solutions. Through its products, Hospira helps improve the safety, cost, and productivity of patient care. The company is headquartered in Lake Forest, Ill., and has approximately 14,000 employees. Learn more at http://www.hospira.com.

(1) U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (n.d.) HHS Action Plan to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections: Coordination, Evaluation, and Conclusion, http://www.hhs.gov/ash/initiatives/hai/cec.html, Accessed June 21, 2011
(2) Ledue, Chelsey. "HAI report highlights improvement at Pennsylvania hospitals." Healthcare Finance News, June 28, 2010, http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hai-report-highlights-improvement-pennsylvania-hospitals, Accessed April 16, 2011
SOURCE Hospira

LAKE FOREST, Ill., May 23, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ --

Hospira (NYSE: HSP), a leading provider of clinical information and medication delivery technologies, today announced that Hospira and DSS, Inc., are the recipients of an Industry Innovation Award from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for Hospira's TheraDoc™ clinical surveillance system. As a result, DSS, Inc., a healthcare information technology provider, will partner with the VA and Hospira to implement the TheraDoc software as a pilot project at several VA medical centers. The pilot is among only one percent of ideas selected from more than 10,000 submitted to date through the VA Innovation Initiative.
The pilot program will focus on using TheraDoc clinical surveillance technology to help identify and decrease the impact of adverse drug events (ADEs). Using DSS technology, the TheraDoc software interfaces with the VA's proprietary electronic health record to receive the appropriate data to identify, analyze and report ADEs in the TheraDoc system. TheraDoc software is currently in use at seven VA medical centers for a broad range of patient safety applications including: infection control, antimicrobial stewardship and ADE reduction.
Adverse drug events are linked to increased morbidity and mortality, and have a substantial negative impact on healthcare institutions and society. For example, (1)(2)
more than 770,000 people are injured or killed annually in hospitals from ADEs,
ADEs cost as high as $5.6 million per hospital each year, and
ADEs cost up to $5.6 billion annually in the United States.
"Hospira is honored to receive this award and be a part of a program focused on improving patient safety and the quality of care we provide to our veterans," said France Pitera, vice president, Clinical Information Technology, Hospira. "Through this clinical surveillance system pilot program, these hospitals will have additional tools to support ADE reduction and be able to evaluate technologies that could possibly be implemented across VA medical centers nationwide."
About the TheraDoc Clinical Surveillance System
The TheraDoc clinical surveillance system is actively used in more than 300 U.S. hospitals, making critical patient information and medical knowledge readily available to help clinicians intervene quickly, prescribe appropriately and improve the quality of patient care, as well as facilitate reporting of healthcare-acquired infections via the National Healthcare Safety Network. The TheraDoc Clinical Intelligence™ platform is the engine that powers several knowledge modules, including the Infection Control Assistant™, Antibiotic Assistant™, ADE Assistant™, Clinical Alerts Assistant™ and Anticoagulation Assistant™. For more information about TheraDoc, visit http://www.theradoc.com or call (801) 415-4400.
About DSS
DSS, Inc. develops and supplies integrated enhancements to the Veterans Affairs VistA system and specializes in healthcare IT solutions that improve quality and productivity. The organization also designs applications that are compatible with the Indian Health Services RPMS and the Department of Defense's healthcare systems.
vxVistA is DSS' open source version of VistA that has been enhanced to meet the needs of non-VA users. The company also offers add-on products including behavioral health, clinical decision support, dental electronic records, document imaging and revenue cycle solutions. To foster the adoption of open source in healthcare organizations, DSS is a founder and supporter of a community-driven, collaboration environment Web site, www.vxVistA.org that acts as a forum for discussion and best practices among worldwide vxVistA and VistA EHR users. For more information on DSS, Inc., visit www.dssinc.com.
About Hospira
Hospira, Inc., is a global specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery company dedicated to Advancing Wellness™. As the world leader in specialty generic injectable pharmaceuticals, Hospira offers one of the broadest portfolios of generic acute-care and oncology injectables, as well as integrated infusion therapy and medication management solutions. Through its products, Hospira helps improve the safety, cost, and productivity of patient care. The company is headquartered in Lake Forest, Ill., and has approximately 14,000 employees. Learn more at http://www.hospira.com.
(1) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. March 2001. Reducing and Preventing Adverse Drug Events To Decrease Hospital Costs. Research in Action, Issue 1. http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/aderia/aderia.htm, Accessed May 11, 2011
(2) Bates et al. "The costs of adverse drug events in hospitalized patients." JAMA. 1997; 277:307-311
SOURCE Hospira

LAKE FOREST, Ill., April 7, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ --

As part of World Health Day 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling on policy makers, providers, the public and the healthcare industry to take action to combat the serious health threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Aligned with these efforts, Hospira, Inc. (NYSE: HSP) is focusing on the growing importance of clinical surveillance systems to help reduce AMR by helping healthcare providers optimize antibiotic therapy and provide the "right drug for the right bug."
Antimicrobial agents, used to treat infections, are one of the most important advances in medicine, alleviating suffering from infectious diseases and saving countless lives over the past 70 years.(1) According to WHO, the world is at risk of losing this critical arsenal of medicines due to the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials, as well as poor infection-control practices, resulting in the spread of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). These challenges increase antimicrobial use and resistance, and have been linked to patient morbidity and mortality. According to WHO reports, at any given time, approximately 1.7 million people have an HAI, an estimated 60 percent of which are caused by a drug-resistant bacteria.(2)(3)
In the United States, antimicrobial drug resistance is estimated to deliver an incremental cost of $16.6 billion to $26 billion annually.(4) As a result, hospitals are taking steps to address the problem, utilizing clinical surveillance systems to help them identify and prevent HAIs and combat AMR through real-time decision support focused on improving antibiotic use.
Clinical surveillance systems play a key role in the antimicrobial stewardship program at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, part of the Henry Ford Health System, helping to replace inefficient, labor-intensive manual methods of antibiotic and antimicrobial monitoring.
"Henry Ford Hospital deployed the TheraDoc™ clinical surveillance platform to improve the efficiency of the antimicrobial stewardship program," said Ed Szandzik, R.Ph., M.B.A., director of pharmacy, Henry Ford Health System. "The technology has helped prevent the overuse and misuse of antibiotics. Our stewardship program has been able to reduce antimicrobial use by 20 percent and help reverse the trend on C.difficilerates (which are currently below the Centers for Disease Control benchmark) through enhanced guidelines, policies, procedures and electronic monitoring."
Policy makers are also taking steps to address the growing problems of HAIs and the potential for associated antimicrobial resistance. For example, U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) has been a leader in this area with his legislation: "Strategies to Address Antimicrobial Resistance Act" (STAAR Act), which supports many of the WHO AMR policies. In addition, several states have enacted legislation to require statewide reporting of HAIs. Many states now require hospitals to electronically report HAIs through the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN).
Reporting HAIs alone, however, is often not enough. Combating AMR requires a comprehensive approach of reducing HAIs through surveillance and the appropriate use of antibiotics. This comprehensive approach is already achieving results in some states. After implementing a mandatory reporting program for HAIs, which also requires use of electronic clinical surveillance systems to track and report infections, the Pennsylvania Department of Health reported a 12.5 percent reduction in HAIs in the state's acute-care hospitals in 2009.(5)
"Reducing HAIs is critical in the fight against antimicrobial resistance, as poor infection prevention and control can increase the spread of antibiotic-resistant infections," said France Pitera, vice president, Clinical Information Technology, Hospira. "Hospitalized patients can be reservoirs for resistant microorganisms, and patients who are carriers of resistant microorganisms can spread infections to other patients. For this reason, electronic clinical surveillance systems that leverage real-time data exchange to help hospitals address both problems -- HAIs and antimicrobial resistance -- are crucial."
About the TheraDoc Clinical Surveillance Platform
TheraDoc systems are actively used in more than 300 U.S. hospitals, making critical patient information and medical knowledge readily available to help clinicians intervene quickly, prescribe appropriately and improve the quality of patient care, as well as facilitate reporting of HAIs via the NHSN. The patented TheraDoc clinical surveillance platform is the engine that powers several knowledge modules, including the Infection Control Assistant™, Antibiotic Assistant™, ADE Assistant™, Clinical Alerts Assistant™ and Anticoagulation Assistant™. For more information about TheraDoc, visit http://www.theradoc.com or call (801) 415-4400.
About Hospira
Hospira, Inc., is a global specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery company dedicated to Advancing Wellness™. As the world leader in specialty generic injectable pharmaceuticals, Hospira offers one of the broadest portfolios of generic acute-care and oncology injectables, as well as integrated infusion therapy and medication management solutions. Through its products, Hospira helps improve the safety, cost, and productivity of patient care. The company is headquartered in Lake Forest, Ill., and has approximately 14,000 employees. Learn more at http://www.hospira.com.
(1) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. July 22, 2010. About Antimicrobial Resistance: A Brief Overview, http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/about.html, Accessed April 6, 2011
(2) U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (n.d.) Healthcare-Associated Infections, http://www.hhs.gov/ash/initiatives/hai/, Accessed March 29, 2011
(3) World Health Organization. Medicines are losing their effectiveness, 1999, http://www.who.int/infectious-disease-report/pages/ch12text.html, Accessed April 6, 2011
(4) Center for Global Development. The Race Against Drug Resistance, 2010, http://www.cgdev.org/files/1424207_file_CGD_DRWG_FINAL.pdf, Accessed April 6, 2011
(5) Ledue, Chelsey. "HAI report highlights improvement at Pennsylvania hospitals." Healthcare Finance News, June 28, 2010, http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hai-report-highlights-improvement-pennsylvania-hospitals, Accessed April 16, 2011
SOURCE Hospira

LAKE FOREST, Ill., April 1, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ --
Hospira, Inc. (NYSE: HSP), a leading provider of clinical information and medication delivery technologies, today announced the launch of its enhanced TheraDoc™ clinical surveillance system, used by hospitals to help improve patient safety and prevent adverse events such as healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). The enhanced TheraDoc system includes new features and functionalities designed to improve user satisfaction, reporting capabilities and work efficiency.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20040503/HSPLOGO)
Patient safety issues such as HAIs, adverse drug events and antimicrobial resistant infections have been linked to increased morbidity and mortality, and have an enormous financial impact on healthcare institutions and society. An estimated 1.7 million patients develop an HAI in the United States each year, and 99,000 die as a result, adding $28-$33 billion in healthcare costs.(1)
The TheraDoc platform enhancements are designed to help hospitals meet and improve upon evolving quality metrics and national patient safety goals. The new platform also helps clinicians more easily identify antimicrobial resistant pathogens and drug-bug mismatches. Improvements to the TheraDoc Infection Control Assistant™ module facilitate seamless electronic reporting of HAIs to the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) and provide a new infection control dashboard for enhanced reporting, data comparison and benchmarking. Clinicians and healthcare institutions can now use TheraDoc to automatically track and generate electronic reports regarding urinary tract infections (UTI), central line insertion practices (CLIP), laboratory-identified multi-drug resistant organisms (MDRO) and C. difficile-associated disease (CDAD) events. This additional functionality will help to decrease manual sorting of laboratory results and streamline public health reporting.
"The enhanced TheraDoc platform has added even more valuable tools available to our infection prevention team at Kootenai Health," said Lee Rieken R.N., C.I.C., infection prevention unit supervisor, Kootenai Health in Idaho. "The TheraDoc team continues to reach out to its customers and listen to their needs. As increasing demands are placed on the infection preventionist, the tools afforded them are increasing as well. I appreciate the dashboard within the new TheraDoc platform, because it is quite intuitive to use and helps us benchmark against NHSN."
Stanley Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph., general manager, TheraDoc, Hospira, said, "The enhanced TheraDoc system reflects Hospira's commitment to delivering innovative patient safety surveillance and clinical-decision support solutions."
"TheraDoc systems are actively used in more than 300 U.S. hospitals, making critical patient information and medical knowledge readily available to help clinicians intervene quickly, prescribe appropriately and improve the quality of patient care," Pestotnik said. "The enhancements to our platform will further maximize these important benefits."
The TheraDoc clinical surveillance platform is being demonstrated at Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) booth #107 through April 4. For more information about TheraDoc, visit http://www.theradoc.com or call (801) 415-4400.
About Hospira
Hospira, Inc., is a global specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery company dedicated to Advancing Wellness™. As the world leader in specialty generic injectable pharmaceuticals, Hospira offers one of the broadest portfolios of generic acute-care and oncology injectables, as well as integrated infusion therapy and medication management solutions. Through its products, Hospira helps improve the safety, cost, and productivity of patient care. The company is headquartered in Lake Forest, Ill., and has approximately 14,000 employees. Learn more at http://www.hospira.com.
Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 --
A Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the enhanced TheraDoc system. Hospira cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Economic, competitive, governmental, regulatory, legal, technological and other factors that may affect Hospira's operations and may cause actual results to be materially different from expectations include the risks, uncertainties and factors discussed under the headings "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in Hospira's latest Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are incorporated by reference. Hospira undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to forward-looking statements as the result of subsequent events or developments.
(1) U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (n.d.) Healthcare-Associated Infections, http://www.hhs.gov/ash/initiatives/hai/ Accessed March 29, 2011
SOURCE Hospira

We are very proud of the impact we have brought over the past decade to reduce the fragmentation and isolation that exists between patient data and best practice guidelines. Give us a call today to arrange a demo at your facility. We look forward to showing you how TheraDoc can help further your own patient safety initiatives.

(801) 415-4400

LAKE FOREST, Ill., July 13, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ --

Hospira, Inc. (NYSE: HSP), a leading provider of clinical information and medication delivery technologies, today announced a study showing how the TheraDoc™ clinical surveillance system helped clinicians at Memorial Hospital Miramar reduce catheter-related infections, which correlated with an increase in infection-control interventions. The hospital, which used TheraDoc to electronically track the number of interventions and catheters removed, as well as infection rates, is reporting the results in a poster presentation at the 2010 Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) annual conference in New Orleans July 11-15.

Memorial Hospital Miramar, a 178-bed facility in South Florida, began using the TheraDoc Infection Control Assistant™ in 2008 to electronically record requests to remove urinary and central line catheters, and to document catheter-related urinary tract and bloodstream infections. Intervention requests were made by the hospital's infection preventionist, who attended daily rounds with the medical teams and often suggested the removal of urinary and central line catheters to help reduce infection risk. Months with more interventions were associated with fewer catheter-related infections, providing data to support infection-prevention efforts.

Catheter-associated infections are a significant problem for hospitals. Urinary tract infections (UTIs) account for 40 percent of the healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) in the United States,(1) and 250,000 to 500,000 catheter-associated bloodstream infections (CABIs) occur in the nation each year. In addition to improving patient safety, avoiding these infections can result in significant cost savings for hospitals -- costs for each UTI and CABI are estimated at $600 and up to $29,000, respectively.(2)

According to Alex Chavez, C.I.C., infection-control practitioner at Memorial Hospital Miramar, preventing catheter-related infections is a focus for infection preventionists, but manually documenting and assessing the impact of interventions on infection rates can be challenging. When Chavez learned that the hospital was using TheraDoc to assess pharmacy interventions, he realized that the technology could do the same for infection prevention.

"The ability to electronically document interventions and then tie them to reduced infection rates is critical," Chavez said. "TheraDoc helps us quantify the value of infection preventionists in improving patient care and demonstrates the importance of interactions between infection preventionists and clinical staff."

Memorial Hospital Miramar, part of Memorial Healthcare System, has been using TheraDoc for infection prevention since 2008. TheraDoc automates the collection and analysis of clinical data from a range of sources within the hospital and alerts caregivers to clinically significant changes in patients' conditions that need to be addressed. The software also helps coordinate communication among care teams and hospital executives, and facilitates reporting to public health officials and quality organizations.

"Memorial Healthcare's innovative use of the TheraDoc clinical surveillance platform spans many areas of patient care -- from documenting infection prevention and pharmacy activities and meeting pediatric asthma core quality measures, to tracking H1N1 influenza cases," said Stanley Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph., general manager, TheraDoc. "Its success with these initiatives illustrates the versatility of the TheraDoc platform to help clinicians quickly address quality and patient safety challenges that hospitals face every day."

Other abstracts related to TheraDoc being presented at the 2010 APIC meeting include:

• Can Automated Surveillance Software Assist with Cohorting Patients with Multidrug-Resistant Organisms? Poster #12-128, Hahnamann University Hospital.
• Does an Automated Infection Surveillance System Benefit a Hospital with Limited Information System Resources? Poster #12-131, Hahnamann University Hospital.

With the patented TheraDoc Expert System Platform™ as the engine, the Infection Control Assistant complements several hospital surveillance modules powered by TheraDoc, including the ADE Assistant™, Clinical Alerts Assistant™, Antibiotic Assistant™ and the company's newest TheraDoc module, the Anticoagulation Assistant™. With 1.7 million HAIs occurring annually, clinicians at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions used Infection Control Assistant to help reduce HAI-confirmation time by 50 percent while achieving 98 percent accuracy of infection identification.(3),(4) For more information about the TheraDoc platform, visit http://www.theradoc.com/.

About Hospira

Hospira, Inc. is a global specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery company dedicated to Advancing Wellness(TM). As the world leader in specialty generic injectable pharmaceuticals, Hospira offers one of the broadest portfolios of generic acute-care and oncology injectables, as well as integrated infusion therapy and medication management solutions. Through its products, Hospira helps improve the safety, cost and productivity of patient care. The company is headquartered in Lake Forest, Ill., and has approximately 13,500 employees. Learn more at http://www.hospira.com/default.aspx.

(1) Johnson J, Kuskowski M, Wilt T. Systematic review: antimicrobial urinary catheters to prevent catheter-associated urinary tract infection in hospitalized patients. Ann Intern Med. Jan. 17 2006;144:116-126.

(2) Weinstein R. An evidence-based approach to the prevention of central line-associated bloodstream infections in hospitalized patients. http://cme.medscape.com/viewarticle/705882. Accessed May 19, 2010.

(3) Klevens RM, Edwards JR, et. al. Estimating health care-associated infections and deaths in U.S. hospitals. Public Health Reports: Volume 122, March-April 2007. http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/pdf/Scott_CostPaper.pdf Accessed Nov. 4, 2009.

(4) Xiaoyan S, Mackie K, et. al. Benefits of using TheraDoc to assist in surveillance for central line associated nomsocomial bloodstream Infections (CA-BSIs). 17th Annual Scientific Session. SHEA, 2006.

Although anticoagulation therapy is widely used to effectively treat many conditions, adverse events frequently occur due to dosing complexities and difficulties monitoring the safety and efficacy of the medication. Anticoagulants are associated with approximately nine percent of all hospital adverse drug events (ADEs).(1) With 117,700 ADEs each year related to anticoagulant therapy, these types of medication errors represent an annual financial burden of up to $1 billion on the healthcare system.(1,2)

The Anticoagulation Assistant module helps clinicians prevent patient harm by tracking the condition of patients receiving anticoagulation therapy and providing early indications of potential therapeutic concerns or ADEs. Effective monitoring of anticoagulants is essential, with 6.2 percent of patients impacted by an anticoagulant medication error requiring medical intervention and 1.5 percent needing prolonged hospitalization.(3)

The launch of the Anticoagulation Assistant module follows the introduction of an Anticoagulation Alerts package in 2009. Designed for use with the TheraDoc Expert System Platform™ core technology, the Anticoagulation Assistant provides an expanded set of alerts, clinical case dashboards, intervention documentation and a patient flag model for tracking therapy based on Joint Commission standards. The Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal Accreditation Program indicates that hospitals use standardized practices for anticoagulation therapy and evaluate practices to help reduce the risk of ADEs associated with anticoagulants.(4) The Anticoagulation Assistant supports these important practices, helping to streamline caregiver communication, improve clinical workflow and enhance patient safety.

Pharmacists and clinicians at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) are using Hospira's TheraDoc Anticoagulation Assistant software to capture pertinent data and send anticoagulation-related alerts to staff to help prevent patient injury and document compliance with the National Patient Safety Goal.

"The TheraDoc platform has become the backbone of our anticoagulation program to help us quickly catch and document potential adverse events, tests that need to be ordered, or lab values that are too high or too low," said Sue Skledar, R.Ph., M.P.H., F.A.S.H.P., director of the Drug Use and Disease State Management Program at UPMC. "It's quick and efficient, and it can be set up to let you know immediately when something needs to be addressed. Rather than looking at five or six reports, TheraDoc provides a single, integrated system for alerting us if we need to take action."

According to Stanley Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph., general manager, TheraDoc, Hospira, the Anticoagulation Assistant exemplifies the role the TheraDoc platform plays in helping clinicians address patient safety and medication error prevention with clinical information technology.

"Hospira's TheraDoc system takes data from a range of sources within the hospital and turns it into actionable information, alerting caregivers to clinically significant events to help them make appropriate -- and timely -- interventions," Pestotnik said. "Our platform approach allows healthcare providers to address a variety of patient care issues, ranging from Joint Commission patient safety goals to unanticipated challenges such as the H1N1 influenza outbreak."

With Hospira's patented TheraDoc Expert System Platform as the engine, the Anticoagulation Assistant complements several hospital surveillance modules already powered by TheraDoc, including the ADE Assistant™, Clinical Alerts Assistant™, Antibiotic Assistant™ and the company's leading TheraDoc module, Infection Control Assistant?. With 1.7 million hospital acquired infections (HAIs) occurring annually, Johns Hopkins used Infection Control Assistant to help reduce HAI confirmation time by 50 percent while achieving 98 percent accuracy of infection identification. For more information about the TheraDoc platform, visit www.theradoc.com.

About Hospira Hospira, Inc. is a global specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery company dedicated to Advancing Wellness™. As the world leader in specialty generic injectable pharmaceuticals, Hospira offers one of the broadest portfolios of generic acute-care and oncology injectables, as well as integrated infusion therapy and medication management solutions. Through its products, Hospira helps improve the safety, cost and productivity of patient care. The company is headquartered in Lake Forest, Ill., and has approximately 13,500 employees. Learn more at www.hospira.com.

Media
Barbara Sullivan
Sullivan & Associates
(714) 374-6174

Tareta Adams
Hospira
(224) 212-2535

Financial Community
Karen King Hospira
(224) 212-2711

Ruth Venning
Hospira
(224) 212-2774

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

Elixhauser A. and Owens P. (AHRQ). Adverse Drug Events in U.S.
Hospitals, 2004. HCUP Statistical Brief #29. April 2007.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD.

http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb29.pdf

1 Accessed Dec. 30, 2009.
Aspden P, Wolcott J, Bootman J, Cronenwett L, eds. Preventing
Medical Errors: Quality Chasm Series. Washington DC: National
2 Academies Press; 2007. Accessed May 15, 2009.
Fanikos J, Stapinski C, Koo S, Kucher N, Tsilimingras K,
Goldhaber SZ. Medication errors associated with anticoagulant
3 therapy in a hospital. Am J Cardiol.2004; 94(4):532-5.
The Joint Commission. Accreditation Program: Hospitals
National Patient Safety Goals (pre-publication copy). 2009.
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare
Organizations. http://www.jointcommission.org/NR/
rdonlyres/868C9E07-037F-433D-8858-0D5FAA4322F2/0/
4 RevisedChapter_HAP_NPSG_20090924.pdf Accessed Feb. 22, 2010.
Klevens RM, Edwards JR, et. al. Estimating health care-
associated infections and deaths in U.S. hospitals. Public
Health Reports: Volume 122, March-April 2007. http://
www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/pdf/Scott_CostPaper.pdf Accessed
5 Nov. 4, 2009
Xiaoyan S, Mackie K, et. al. Benefits of using TheraDoc to
assist in surveillance for central line associated
nomsocomial bloodstream Infections (CA-BSIs). 17th Annual
6 Scientific Session. SHEA, 2006.

Introduced in October 2009 by HIMSS and the American Society for Quality (ASQ), the Stories of Success! program called for case studies showcasing real-world examples of leveraging health information technology to improve patient safety, quality, effectiveness and efficiency. Memorial Healthcare System was honored by a peer-review body of experts from HIMSS, the Joint Commission, the National Committee for Quality Assurance and the ASQ.

The recognized case study highlighted how MHS' Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital (JDCH) met Children's asthma care core measures by using a team approach and tools from the TheraDoc computerized safety surveillance and decision support system. Healthcare providers at JDCH found that it was difficult to track all pediatric asthma patients to ensure compliance with the measures. In some cases, patient length of stay was only one to two days, further complicating efforts to comply with the core measures. The team utilized TheraDoc computer-generated alerts to identify pediatric asthma patients based on prescription medication and admissions data as a first step in implementing a core measure for providing pediatric asthma home management care plans to patients and caregivers -- resulting in a 97 percent compliance rate with the asthma core measures.

JDCH has used the TheraDoc decision support technology since 2007 for infection prevention, medication safety and other applications. The system automates the collection and analysis of clinical data from a range of sources within the hospital and alerts caregivers to clinically significant information so that appropriate interventions can be made. The software also helps coordinate communication among patient care teams and hospital executives, and facilitates reporting to public health officials and quality organizations.

"We adopted the pediatric asthma initiatives based on our desire to be at the forefront of quality patient care," said Alice Chan, R.Ph., IT clinical applications manager at MHS. "We were committed to decreasing the need for readmission and achieving a high compliance rate with the quality measures, and TheraDoc helped us streamline the process. We are pleased that we can share our experience and success of using information technology to help improve the quality of patient care."

According to Stanley Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph., general manager, TheraDoc, Hospira, JDCH's success with these quality initiatives illustrates the versatility of the TheraDoc clinical surveillance platform, which provides tools to quickly address a range of quality and patient safety challenges that arise in healthcare every day.

"We are pleased that Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital's outstanding accomplishments were recognized by HIMSS," Pestotnik said. "Healthcare quality and patient safety challenges continue to be two of the country's most critical healthcare priorities, and we share the hospital's ongoing commitment to improving patient safety and care through the management of medical information."

About the HIMSS "Stories of Success!" Program
The HIMSS "Stories of Success!" are designed to highlight the fulfillment of national priorities established by the National Priorities Partnership and The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goals. Sixteen real-world and peer-reviewed case study submissions were designated as either Tier 1 or Tier 2 finalists as part of the inaugural call for case studies. Memorial Healthcare System was honored in the Tier 2 category. To receive a copy of the case study, e-mail bsullivan@sullivanpr.com.

About Hospira
Hospira, Inc. is a global specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery company dedicated to Advancing Wellness?. As the world leader in specialty generic injectable pharmaceuticals, Hospira offers one of the broadest portfolios of generic acute-care and oncology injectables, as well as integrated infusion therapy and medication management solutions. Through its products, Hospira helps improve the safety, cost and productivity of patient care. The company is headquartered in Lake Forest, Ill., and has approximately 13,500 employees. Learn more at www.hospira.com.

Media
Barbara Sullivan
(714) 374-6174
bsullivan@sullivanpr.com

Tareta Adams
(224) 212-2535

Financial Community
Karen King
(224) 212-2711

Ruth Venning
(224) 212-2774

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

LAKE FOREST, ILLINOIS, December 2, 2009 – Hospira, Inc. (NYSE: HSP), a leading provider of clinical information and medication delivery technologies, announced today that it has acquired Salt Lake City-based TheraDoc, a clinical informatics company that develops hospital surveillance systems. TheraDoc's two leading products, Infection Control AssistantTM and Antibiotic AssistantTM, join Hospira's expanding portfolio of medication safety and infection management products. Hospira will demonstrate both products at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) 21st Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care (Dec. 6 - 9 in Orlando) and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Mid-Year Clinical Meeting and Exhibition (Dec. 6 - 10 in Las Vegas).

"The acquisition of TheraDoc aligns well with Hospira's focus on improving the clinical outcomes, caregiver productivity and safety of patient care," said Philip Settimi, M.D., vice president, Global Marketing, Devices, Hospira. "TheraDoc is the gold-standard in enterprise-wide clinical surveillance and decision support. Hospira now offers a truly comprehensive solution for medication safety and infection management, which are two of providers' most pressing healthcare challenges."

According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are 99,000 deaths due to hospital-acquired infections (HAI) and 1.7 million HAIs annually. Careful monitoring of infections is critical with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' emphasis on avoiding "Never Events," and hospitals facing reduced funding and coverage based on infection rates.

With HAIs costing between $28.4 billion and $33 billion each year, Johns Hopkins used TheraDoc to help reduce HAI confirmation time by 50 percent while achieving 98 percent accuracy of infection identification. TheraDoc's Infection Control Assistant provides continuous infection monitoring, intelligent alerts and timely analysis of hospital infections. The product joins Hospira's portfolio of infection management tools, including the LifeShieldTM TKOTM and Antimicrobial CLAVETM, devices that are designed to help address potential infection-related contamination.

In the early stages of the H1N1 influenza pandemic, several hospitals employed TheraDoc's surveillance platform to more effectively manage their responses. Computerized surveillance helps hospitals manage and coordinate infectious disease care -- especially important during fast-moving situations.

"During the recent H1N1 outbreak, TheraDoc was particularly helpful with tracking patient information and monitoring which patients were being admitted with influenza-like symptoms," said Lori Goffinet, R.N., B.S.N., Infection Prevention & Control, OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill.

A key advantage of the TheraDoc technology for OSF and other multi-hospital systems is the ability to access information about infections across all facilities from one central location. As a result, TheraDoc provides a system-wide picture of what is happening with infections.

TheraDoc's Antibiotic Assistant provides real-time point-of-care screening to arm clinicians with timely and relevant information about antimicrobial resistance trends. This allows clinicians to effectively monitor and analyze the spread of infectious diseases so that the right antibiotic treatment can be prescribed. Antibiotic Assistant complements Hospira's medication safety products like SymbiqTM and Plum A+TM smart infusion pumps and Hospira MedNetTM safety software, which were also designed to support safe and effective drug delivery.

"Hospira and TheraDoc share a dedication to advancing the quality and safety of care through advanced medical technology," said Stanley L. Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph., co-founder, president and CEO, TheraDoc. "TheraDoc's leadership in providing real-time clinical decision support, combined with Hospira's market-leading position driving medication safety and infection management, will result in expanded access to technologies that are integral to patient care."

TheraDoc has approximately 85 employees and prominent customers across the United States, including Johns Hopkins, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), the Mayo Clinic Jacksonville, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, National Institutes of Health Clinical Centers, Yale-New Haven Hospital, Cedars-Sinai Medical System and many more. The company's products are also under evaluation by hospitals in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

As part of the agreement, Hospira acquired additional assets related to the TheraDoc business, including the headquarters in Salt Lake City, and the TheraDoc employees are now a part of Hospira. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

About Hospira
Hospira, Inc. is a global specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery company dedicated to Advancing Wellness. As the world leader in specialty generic injectable pharmaceuticals, Hospira offers one of the broadest portfolios of generic acute-care and oncology injectables, as well as integrated infusion therapy and medication management solutions. Through its products, Hospira helps improve the safety, cost and productivity of patient care. The company is headquartered in Lake Forest, Ill., and has approximately 14,000 employees. Learn more at www.hospira.com.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics leader dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. With TheraDoc's Expert System Platform as the "engine," the company offers a suite of Knowledge Modules that includes the Infection Control Assistant and Antibiotic Assistant. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans more than two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.

Media
Tareta Adams
(224) 212-2535

Financial Community
Karen King
(224) 212-2711

Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 -- A Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Hospira cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Economic, competitive, governmental, technological and other factors that may affect Hospira's operations and may cause actual results to be materially different from expectations include the risks, uncertainties and factors discussed under the headings "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in Hospira's latest Annual Report on Form 10-K, and Hospira's subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, which are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and incorporated by reference. Hospira undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to forward-looking statements as the result of subsequent events or developments.

1 Klevens RM, Edwards JR, et. al. Estimating health care-associated infections and deaths in U.S. hospitals. Public Health Reports: Volume 122, March?April 2007. http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/pdf/Scott_CostPaper.pdf Accessed Nov. 4, 2009
2 Scott RD. Healthcare-associated infections in U.S. hospitals and the benefits of prevention. Economist Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion National Center for Preparedness, Detection, and Control of Infectious Diseases Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/pdf/hicpac/infections_deaths.pdf. March 2009 Accessed Nov. 4, 2009
3 Xiaoyan S, Mackie K, et. al. Benefits of using TheraDoc to assist in surveillance for central line associated nomsocomial bloodstream Infections (CA-BSIs). 17th Annual Scientific Session. SHEA, 2006

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Oct. 15, 2009 SALT LAKE CITY... TheraDoc®, the leading provider of clinical decision support technology in healthcare, today announced that it has started beta testing of a new computerized patient surveillance tool that will help hospitals monitor and manage screening programs for multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs), such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which every year kills more people in the United States than AIDS.

The MDRO Compliance Manager, designed for use with TheraDoc's Infection Control Assistant® and its Expert System Platform® core technology, was created to help hospitals boost compliance with screening protocols by quickly identifying patients who should be tested and those who need to be isolated in order to reduce the spread of MRSA and other drug-resistant organisms to other patients, staff, and visitors.

The beta testing coincides with October's designation as World MRSA Awareness Month to increase knowledge about this serious patient safety threat. MRSA, a type of staph infection that is difficult to treat because it is resistant to many antibiotics, can cause serious problems including boils, septic wounds, heart-valve problems, toxic shock syndrome, and even death.

According to Stanley Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph., president and chief executive officer of TheraDoc, the MDRO Compliance Manager reflects the company's leadership role in providing real-time clinical information that positively impacts the quality and safety of patient care. "This clinical tool will help hospitals efficiently and cost-effectively manage their screening programs for MRSA and other drug-resistant organisms," Pestotnik said.

"It's very flexible, and once configured to match a hospital's specific screening protocol, the tool seamlessly tracks compliance rates regarding patient screening and flags patients in need of screening tests," he said. "Infection preventionists no longer have to spend hours manually reviewing vast amount of data. Reports can be generated at the click of a button, proving real-time, actionable information."

In addition to helping to improve healthcare quality, the MDRO Compliance Manager has the potential to save hospitals money. Drug-resistant infections are enormously expensive—MRSA alone has been estimated to add up to $34,900 in direct medical costs per case, and up to $4.2 billion annually in total healthcare costs. Pestotnik said the tool also would help hospitals reduce costs by identifying patients who don't need to be screened, such as patients known to be infected with MRSA, saving staff time required to test the patient, as well as the cost of the assay. "We are committed to helping hospitals cost-effectively monitor and manage important unfunded patient safety and quality mandates, such as screening for multidrug-resistant organisms," he said.

The MDRO Compliance Manager is the latest product enhancement from TheraDoc, which provides clinical decision support technologies that help hospitals manage a wide range of patient safety issues. Its Expert System Platform monitors lab orders and results, microbiology results, pharmacy data, patient demographics, vital signs, ADT (admission, discharge, and transfer), and other data—providing the most comprehensive interfacing capabilities in the industry.

The system alerts clinicians about potential healthcare-associated infections, infectious disease outbreaks, adverse drug events, or changes in patient conditions so that appropriate and timely interventions can be made. TheraDoc's gold-standard technology also supports and facilitates reporting of notifiable diseases, emerging infections, and other data to local, state, and national public health agencies such as the CDC. The MDRO Compliance Manager will be available to TheraDoc customers as part of its Infection Control Assistant in the first half of 2010.

About TheraDoc TheraDoc is a clinical informatics leader dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. With TheraDoc's Expert System Platform as the "engine," the company offers a suite of Knowledge Modules that includes the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, Clinical Alerts Assistant®, and Anticoagulation Alerts Package. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans more than two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.
About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

TheraDoc's computerized infection surveillance technology - powered by its Expert System Platform® - automates the collection and analysis of patient clinical data from a range of sources within the hospital. Alerts help healthcare providers quickly identify and isolate H1N1 cases, and workflow tools allow them to track infected patients and monitor the progression of an outbreak. The system also helps coordinate communication among patient care teams and hospital executives, and facilitates reporting to public health officials. (See Managing Infection Control article.)

According to Stanley Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph., president and chief executive officer of TheraDoc, as the H1N1 outbreak unfolded earlier this year, TheraDoc technology helped hospitals swiftly respond to this unexpected challenge and prepare for a possible escalation of the outbreak during the winter flu season, as well as for other threats such as healthcare-acquired infections and drug resistant infectious diseases.

"The H1N1 influenza outbreak illustrates the value of TheraDoc's computerized surveillance technology to address a broad range of patient care issues," Pestotnik said. "Hospitals that have adopted TheraDoc may not have had influenza surveillance in mind when they selected our platform but quickly turned to the technology for real-time information to help them manage this challenging situation as quickly and efficiently as possible. We are working closely with hospital users to ensure that the appropriate alerts, isolation management, and reporting are in place in preparation for a possible escalation in H1N1 influenza cases."

Pestotnik said that while TheraDoc technology is helping many hospitals manage their H1N1 responses today, seven years ago at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, public health officials and infectious disease experts at the University of Utah studied the novel surveillance technology for the rapid detection of disease clusters and agents of bioterrorism in the athletes' village and surrounding population. TheraDoc was instrumental in the early identification and management of a flu outbreak in the athletes' village.

TheraDoc provides real-time information to rapidly identify, confirm, and document infections based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. The system monitors lab orders and results, microbiology results, pharmacy data, patient demographics, vital signs, ADT (admission, discharge, and transfer), and other data - providing the most comprehensive interfacing capabilities in the industry. The system alerts clinicians about potential healthcare-associated infections, infectious disease outbreaks, adverse drug events, or changes in patients - conditions so that appropriate and timely interventions can be made. TheraDoc surveillance technology also supports and facilitates standardized reporting of notifiable diseases, emerging infections, and other data to local, state, and national public health agencies such as the CDC.

About TheraDoc TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. With TheraDoc's Expert System Platform as the "engine," the company offers a suite of Knowledge Modules that includes the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, and Clinical Alerts Assistant®. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans more than two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.
Note to editors: To speak with an infectious disease expert or a hospital that is using TheraDoc for H1N1 surveillance, contact Barbara Sullivan at 714/374-6174 or bsullivan@sullivanpr.com.

In forming the board, TheraDoc has brought together a group of professionals with extensive involvement with applied healthcare epidemiology and research, professional societies, government agencies, and other committees focused on the protection of patients. Its work will complement the company's existing Infectious Diseases advisory boards in providing leadership on key patient safety issues facing hospitals today.

According to Michael Barton, PharmD, senior vice president, knowledge and product development for TheraDoc, the Clinical Advisory Board will help the company focus technology development efforts to ensure that its patient safety surveillance and clinical decision support products are consistent with practitioner and researcher needs, best practices, current science, and future legislative and accreditation standards.

Barton said the company looks forward to working with this group of stellar clinical experts from leading institutions to obtain independent and objective advice about the use of real-time surveillance of patient data to prevent healthcare-associated infections, which cause more than 90,000 deaths in the United States each year.

"The TheraDoc® Infection Control Assistant® is playing a key role in providing continuous infection surveillance, intelligent alerts, real-time interventions such as multi-drug resistant organism isolation, and timely analysis of infections at more than 200 hospitals in the United States with impressive results," Barton said. "We hear from hospitals that TheraDoc does an excellent job of making sure that our technologies stay on top of emerging trends and changing clinical needs. Our Infection Prevention and Control Clinical Advisory Board will help ensure that we continue in that leadership role."

The TheraDoc Infection Prevention and Control Clinical Advisory Board includes:

• Co-chair Trish M. Perl, MD, MSc, professor of medicine, pathology, and epidemiology, and hospital epidemiologist, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and University
• Co-chair Anthony Harris, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine and associate hospital epidemiologist, University of Maryland School of Medicine
• Lillian Burns, BS, MT, MPH, CIC, infection control coordinator, Greenwich Hospital
• Julie Jefferson, RN, MPH, CIC, director of epidemiology and infection control, Rhode Island Hospital, and clinical assistant professor of community health, Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University
• Keith Kaye, MD, MPH, professor of medicine and corporate director, infection prevention, epidemiology, and antimicrobial stewardship, Detroit Medical Center and Wayne State University Health Center
• Loretta Litz Fauerbach, MS, CIC, director, infection control, Shands Hospital at the University of Florida
• Gary Noskin, MD, professor of medicine, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine

TheraDoc's core technology is its patented Expert System Platform®, which receives and standardizes patient data from multiple hospital information sources. With the Expert System Platform as the "engine," the company offers a suite of Knowledge Modules that integrate patient data with clinical guidelines. In addition to the Infection Control Assistant, other modules include the Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, and Clinical Alerts Assistant®.

About TheraDoc
Founded in 1999, TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. The company provides innovative products that improve clinical and financial outcomes for a range of provider and payer organizations, including leading healthcare providers Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, and Emory Healthcare. TheraDoc's leadership in medical informatics standards enables the exchange and use of information between disparate health information systems. The company's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.

The ongoing H1N1 influenza pandemic has provided a vivid reminder that hospitals are on the front lines of infectious disease monitoring, identification, and reporting in their communities. And, within hospitals, infection prevention professionals are key players both in managing and coordinating the responses of their institutions to ongoing infectious disease challenges and in preparing for future outbreaks.

Read the entire article

Anticoagulation therapy is risky business. Just how risky became common knowledge in November 2007, amidst widespread media reports that the newborn twins of actor Dennis Quaid had accidentally been given 1,000-fold overdoses of heparin at a Los Angeles hospital. (They survived.) But blood clots, uncontrolled bleeding and other potentially lethal problems associated with blood thinners may become largely things of the past if computerized patient-safety surveillance tools live up to their early promise.

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A recent survey of infection preventionists (IPs) by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) confirmed that while demands on the profession are escalating, 41 percent of respondents to the "2009 APIC Economic Survey" reported reductions in budgets for infection prevention in the last 18 months due primarily to the economic downturn. With resources failing to keep pace with these demands, many IPs are strapped for the funding and staff necessary to ensure that their efforts to monitor and report healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) are optimized.

Read the entire article

SALT LAKE CITY, July 22, 2009 – TheraDoc®, a leader in clinical informatics, today unveiled six new clinical and adverse drug event alert packages designed to help hospitals improve patient care and safety. The alert bundles, addressing a range of clinical areas and drug monitoring parameters, work with the TheraDoc Expert System Platform®, which provides ongoing electronic surveillance of patient data from multiple hospital information sources and alerts caregivers to clinically significant changes in patients' conditions.

The new packages contain from 27 to 55 alerts each and include:

• Patient Monitoring, which scrutinizes lab and admission data for out-of-range test results and shifts in a patient's condition.
• Therapeutic Drug Monitoring & Drug Utilization Monitoring, which track pharmacy and lab data about medications, such as dosage and drug selection, in order to optimize the clinical efficacy and benefit for each patient, as well as costs for hospitals.
• Adverse Drug Event Surveillance, which looks at patient, pharmacy, and lab data to help identify potential adverse drug events and intervene to prevent patient harm. It includes alerts to help automate many medication triggers from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Global Trigger tool to increase medication safety.
• Toxicology, which monitors lab data for the presence or abnormal levels of potentially harmful substances.
• Anticoagulation, which addresses a recent Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal and tracks compliance and the monitoring of patients receiving anticoagulation drug therapy.

The TheraDoc Expert System Platform and these new alert bundles help clinicians meet the challenges of today's complex clinical care environment in a targeted fashion and make enhanced patient safety achievable for any size hospital. The technology allows healthcare providers to better manage the growing torrent of medical information, increased time constraints, demands for accountability, and pressure to contain costs, while providing the highest level of patient care. The alert bundles also offer an affordable way for hospitals and clinics to start the journey toward the 2011 federal goals for meaningful use of health information technology, which focus on such areas as real-time access to medical information, clinical decision support to improve the quality and efficiency of care, and clinical documentation.

Michael Barton, Pharm.D., TheraDoc senior vice president of knowledge and product development, said the alert bundles–which are the result of years of development, testing, validation, and consultation with clinical experts–simplify the implementation process for hospitals. "Our customers have told us that they would benefit from the ability to select preconfigured alert bundles that address specific patient-care issues, initiatives, or quality measures," Barton said. "The alert bundles reflect TheraDoc's mission to help hospitals improve safety and productivity by taking full advantage of available information so they can intervene as quickly as possible to prevent and mitigate problems."

The TheraDoc Expert System Platform receives and standardizes patient data from multiple hospital information sources. With this platform in place, hospitals also can incrementally acquire any of the TheraDoc suite of Knowledge Modules, which includes the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, and Clinical Alerts Assistant®.

About TheraDoc
Founded in 1999, TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. The company provides innovative products that improve clinical and financial outcomes for a range of provider and payer organizations, including leading healthcare providers Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, and Emory Healthcare. TheraDoc's leadership in medical informatics standards enables the exchange and use of information between disparate health information systems. The company's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.

Pestotnik is one of 265 members recently named by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) to participate in 19 volunteer work groups that will explore new paths to certification and rapid, widespread adoption and meaningful use of electronic medical records and clinical decision support as called for under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

The CCHIT is a private, nonprofit organization that has been recognized by the federal government as an official certification body for health information technology. Pestotnik will participate in its Advanced Clinical Decision Support work group, which will play a key role in efforts to increase the adoption of health information technology to improve the safety and efficiency of healthcare.

Pestotnik pioneered the use of clinical decision support for infectious disease prevention and other patient safety issues. For more than 20 years, he conceptualized, designed, and implemented hospital-based computerized decision support programs that enhanced antibiotic management and helped reduce healthcare-associated infections. This work led him to co-found TheraDoc, which has set the standard for real-time surveillance and expert clinical decision support technologies, and has been adopted by hospitals across the country.

TheraDoc has long worked closely with Health Level 7, the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions, and other organizations to aid in the development of interoperability and communications standards that enable disparate healthcare applications to exchange and use clinical and administrative data.

Pestotnik said he is honored to join leaders in the field on creating certification standards for clinical decision support technology. "Advanced clinical decision support takes the torrent of clinical information from diverse hospital sources and transforms it into evidence-based knowledge," he said. "When that knowledge is delivered in a timely manner to the appropriate clinician, patient care is positively impacted. Under the ARRA, billions of dollars in public funds are being invested in healthcare information technology, and certification will help ensure that electronic health records and clinical decision support technology deliver on their promise to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care."

About TheraDoc
Founded in 1999, TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. The company provides innovative products that improve clinical and financial outcomes for a range of provider and payer organizations, including leading healthcare providers Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, and Emory Healthcare. The company's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering work and continuing effort in clinical decision support design and development, which spans two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.

Founded by pioneers in clinical informatics, TheraDoc's standards-based, real-time surveillance tools automatically monitor and standardize patient data from all areas of the hospital, looking for a broad range of adverse events and healthcare-associated infections. Clinicians are quickly alerted to changes in patients' conditions, and evidence-based guidance for treatment decisions is provided.

According to Stanley Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph., president, chief executive officer, and co-founder of TheraDoc, the company's core technology–its patented Expert System Platform®– helps hospitals manage the growing torrent of clinical information, integrating patient data with clinical practice guidelines and delivering it to the right clinicians at the right time to help them positively impact patient care. "Our dynamic technology provides clinicians with real-time information and support," Pestotnik said. "Our software provides the five Ws–who needs to be examined, what needs to be looked at, what needs to be done, why it should be done and, finally, what needs to be documented."

Pestotnik is an innovator in the field of clinical informatics. After receiving countless requests for assistance during innumerable speaking engagements, he founded a company that has set the standard for expert clinical decision support for infectious disease prevention and other critical patient safety issues. TheraDoc dedicated its early years to developing and testing its groundbreaking technology, which was first adopted in 2003 at Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Fla.; the University of Utah; Johns Hopkins Hospital; and Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Since then, its software has been licensed by more than 200 U.S. hospitals in 31 states, including community hospitals, academic and Veterans Affairs medical centers, large integrated delivery networks, and children's and oncology specialty hospitals.

Pestotnik said that solid interfaces with various hospital systems, integrity of the data, and standardization of clinical terminology and coding are vital in order to provide clinicians with accurate and timely information that they can use to positively impact patient care and safety. "Clinicians need to be confident that they are receiving complete and accurate information that they can rely on to make patient-care decisions," he said. "We are most proud of the fact that every healthcare institution that has contracted with us continues to be a customer today."

Examples of the positive impact of TheraDoc technology include:

• H1N1 Influenza - During the recent swine flu outbreak, hospitals used TheraDoc software to quickly identify and track potential cases of the H1N1 virus and enable more efficient coordination among key hospital personnel.
• Infection Prevention & Antimicrobial Management - Using TheraDoc technology, healthcare providers at the Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Fla., reported prevention of 5-6 infection-related deaths per year and annual antibiotic drug cost savings equal to the annual license fees for the TheraDoc system.
• Identification of Disease Clusters/Bioterrorism - At the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, TheraDoc was used for the rapid detection of disease clusters and agents of bioterrorism in the athletes' village and surrounding population. The software provided for early detection and containment of an influenza outbreak.

As for the next 10 years, Pestotnik said healthcare technology will continue to rapidly evolve, and the Obama Administration's focus on healthcare IT will only accelerate the pace. "As an electronic surveillance and clinical decision support leader in the healthcare information technology field for 10 years, TheraDoc is uniquely positioned to help hospitals calmly and effectively meet the changing patient care and regulatory challenges well into the next decade," he said. "Hospitals are under tremendous pressure to improve patient safety, reduce medical errors, and increase efficiency. Our platform-based approach continues to be key in enabling a growing number of healthcare organizations to meet their current and future needs, providing the foundation for a coordinated approach among various hospital departments that is vital to combat the fragmentation of information that has plagued our healthcare system."

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. With TheraDoc's Expert System Platform as the "engine," the company offers a suite of Knowledge Modules that includes the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, and Clinical Alerts Assistant®. The company's leadership in medical informatics standards enables the exchange and use of information between disparate health information systems. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.

Henry Ford Hospital pharmacists and infection prevention practitioners will use the TheraDoc Infection Control Assistant® for hospital-wide infection surveillance and reporting and the Antibiotic Assistant® for individual patient-based infection management and antimicrobial stewardship.

Suboptimal use of antibiotics has contributed to an alarming rise in resistant infectious diseases, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 70 percent of bacteria that cause healthcare-acquired infections are resistant to at least one of the drugs most commonly used to treat them. Antimicrobial stewardship plays a critical role in fighting antibiotic resistance by helping to ensure appropriate drug selection, dosing, and duration to cure infections, while minimizing toxicity and conditions for emergence of resistant bacterial strains.

According to Ed Szandzik, R.Ph., M.B.A., director of pharmacy, Henry Ford Hospital, infectious disease prevention is a top priority at the hospital. "TheraDoc will be an integral component of our antimicrobial stewardship service and infection prevention efforts at Henry Ford Hospital," he said. "The system will help automate the monitoring for infections and antibiotic use, allowing staff to spend less time sorting through data and more time performing interventions and educating staff about best practices."

Rachel Chambers, Pharm.D., B.C.P.S., antimicrobial stewardship pharmacist at Henry Ford, said hospitals are on the front lines in the battle against drug-resistant infectious diseases. "We selected TheraDoc in large part because of its specific focus on and capabilities in antibiotic stewardship," Chambers said. "We also will benefit from access to TheraDoc's user group-collaborating with leading clinicians across the country on ideas and best practices will be extremely beneficial."

According to Stanley Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph., TheraDoc's co-founder, president, and chief executive officer, the company is proud to partner with Henry Ford Hospital in its leading efforts against healthcare-acquired infections and antibiotic resistance. "Like Henry Ford Hospital, we are committed to helping clinicians improve patient safety and achieve optimal outcomes," Pestotnik said. "TheraDoc technology takes the torrent of clinical data from a variety of hospital sources, transforms it into evidence-based knowledge, and delivers it to the right clinicians at the right time to help them positively impact patient care."

TheraDoc's Infection Control Assistant and Antibiotic Assistant work in conjunction with the company's core technology-the patented Expert System Platform®-which automatically receives and standardizes patient data from multiple hospital information sources. With the Expert System Platform as the "engine," TheraDoc offers a suite of Knowledge Modules that integrate patient data with clinical guidelines, providing timely, actionable recommendations on a broad range of patient safety issues faced by hospitals today.

About Henry Ford Hospital and Health System
Henry Ford Hospital is a 903-bed tertiary care hospital, education, and research complex located in Detroit's New Center area. The hospital is a multi-organ transplantation center and Level 1 trauma center and is part of the Henry Ford Health System. The Henry Ford Health System, one of the country's largest healthcare systems, integrates primary and specialty care with research and education. It includes the 1,100-member Henry Ford Medical Group, the 500,000-member Health Alliance Plan, 27 primary care centers, and many other health-related entities located throughout southeastern Michigan. For more information, visit www.henryford.com.

About TheraDoc
Founded in 1999, TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. The company provides innovative products that improve clinical and financial outcomes for a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most respected healthcare institutions in the country such as Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, and Emory Healthcare. TheraDoc's leadership in medical informatics standards enables the exchange and use of information between disparate health information systems. The company's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.

The TheraDoc Anticoagulation Alerts package tracks the condition of patients receiving anticoagulation drug therapy to prevent blood clots, providing an early warning of potential adverse drug events or other problems. Anticoagulation therapy is a high-risk treatment, and adverse events are common due to dosing complexity and difficulties in monitoring the drugs' safety and efficacy. The dangers of anticoagulation drugs gained extensive media coverage in 2008 after actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins received serious overdoses of a blood thinner.

The Anticoagulation Alerts package, designed for use with the TheraDoc Expert System Platform®, was created in part based on the successful use of the many TheraDoc alerts at institutions such as the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), one of the leading nonprofit health systems in the United States. The package includes more than 30 alerts from existing TheraDoc products, and 13 new alerts are scheduled for release in the Anticoagulation Alerts package in May. UPMC is an early user and an investor in TheraDoc.

According to Sue Skledar, RPh, MPH, FASHP, director of the Drug Use and Disease State Management Program at UPMC, the TheraDoc alerts play a key role in the medical center's anticoagulation management program developed to meet the new patient safety goal. UPMC evaluated TheraDoc alerts for anticoagulation management in May 2008, and initiated the alerts as part of the pilot inpatient anticoagulation program in October 2008. Fully implemented programs had to be in place by Jan. 1, 2009, to meet the requirements.

"Many patients receive anticoagulants, so identifying those patients and providing individualized monitoring can be challenging," Skledar said. "TheraDoc is one of our main patient safety surveillance tools used across the health system for a variety of needs, such as infection prevention and adverse drug event monitoring. Since we already had TheraDoc in place, we had a tool that could help us address the new anticoagulation requirements."

Skledar said the TheraDoc system provides flexibility to fit into the different workflow needs of individual pharmacists and hospital pharmacy practice models, and it supports on-line intervention documentation. "TheraDoc has become the backbone of our anticoagulation program to help us quickly catch and document potential adverse events, tests that need to be ordered, or lab values that are too high or low," she said.

According to Michael Barton, Pharm.D., TheraDoc's senior vice president of knowledge and product development, the Anticoagulation Alerts package exemplifies the value of the TheraDoc platform. "Our flexible, robust platform helps customers address a wide range of patient safety issues daily and provides a strong, broad-reaching safety net for patients," Barton said. "Customers appreciate the value delivered and look to the TheraDoc platform for patient safety solutions in areas as divergent as core measures compliance, anticoagulation management, screening for high-alert medications, and even flagging patients with prescription pain medication-seeking behavior."

TheraDoc's patented Expert System Platform receives and standardizes patient data from multiple hospital information sources. With the platform as the "engine," TheraDoc offers a suite of Knowledge Modules that includes the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, and Clinical Alerts Assistant®.

Barton said the initial Anticoagulation Alerts package will be followed by a more comprehensive anticoagulation solution-the Anticoagulation Assistant^TM Module-which will be in beta testing by mid-year and available to customers by year end. It will feature an expanded set of focused alerts, clinical care dashboards, and intervention documentation and compliance reporting tools designed to streamline communication among caregivers, improve clinical workflow, and enhance clinical decision making and patient safety.

About TheraDoc
Founded in 1999, TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. The company provides innovative products that improve clinical and financial outcomes for a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most respected healthcare institutions in the country such as Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, and Emory Healthcare. TheraDoc's leadership in medical informatics standards enables the exchange and use of information between disparate health information systems. The company's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.

A home care plan is vital to improving outcomes for asthma-the most common chronic disease in children and one of the most frequent reasons for hospital admissions and readmissions. It is one of three Children's Asthma Care core measures created by the Joint Commission as part of broader quality and public reporting initiatives. While the first two measures, which focus on providing appropriate medications, typically have high levels of compliance, meeting the more complex and detailed home management plan requirement presents significant challenges for hospitals. The plan must outline follow-up physician visits, medications, steps to manage asthma attacks, and environmental triggers, among other details.

According to Lucille Fasone, MPH, RRT, respiratory manager at JDCH, the hospital identified a need for a tracking system that could capture children admitted with a diagnosis of asthma, as well as those admitted with other diagnoses or symptoms identifying them as asthma patients. Fasone said short hospital stays require quick identification of patients to allow time for the team to implement the home care plan.

As a result, the hospital turned to TheraDoc, which has been used at the facility for more than a year for infection prevention and medication safety applications, to create reliable EZ Alerts flagging all patients ages 2¿17 prescribed steroids and bronchodilators. While pediatric asthma core measures are required only for freestanding hospitals, JDCH adopted the initiatives based on its desire to be at the forefront of quality patient care and now is in the top 10 percentile in compliance for all three measures.

"Using our existing TheraDoc platform, we were able to easily configure alerts based on medication and hospital admission diagnosis data," Fasone said. "TheraDoc has helped us streamline the process of identifying pediatric asthma patients so that we can be sure they receive the best quality care."

TheraDoc co-founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer Stan Pestotnik said, "Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital's success with these quality initiatives is a terrific example of the versatility of the TheraDoc Expert System Platform®, which provides clinicians with real-time tools to address a range of quality and patient safety challenges that arise in healthcare every day. We are honored by the trust and confidence demonstrated by the hospital's team in using TheraDoc for an easy-to-configure alert system to help them meet the pediatric asthma requirements."

TheraDoc's core technology is its patented Expert System Platform, which automatically receives and standardizes patient data from multiple hospital information sources. The EZ Alerts Assistant is part of the clinical tools in the platform that complement a suite of unique software products that also includes the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, and Clinical Alerts Assistant®.

Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital
Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital is part of the Memorial Healthcare System. It is a patient and family-centered care facility that meets the complex needs of children by providing a comprehensive scope of inpatient and outpatient pediatric services supervised by the largest diversity of board-certified specialists in the region. The hospital's mission is to provide high-quality healthcare services to our patients, regardless of their ability to pay, with the goal of improving the health status of the community we serve. As an advocate for children's healthcare and related causes, Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital offers community education, child safety programs and the Conine Clubhouse, a home away from home for families of sick children. For more information, visit www.jdch.com.

About TheraDoc
Founded in 1999, TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency, and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. The company provides innovative products that improve clinical and financial outcomes for a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most respected healthcare institutions in the country such as Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, and Emory Healthcare. The company's leadership in medical informatics standards enables interoperability with disparate health information systems. Its founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans two decades. For more information, visit www.theradoc.com.

Epidemiologists are the Sherlock Holmes of medicine. As medical detectives, epidemiologists' mission is to track down causes of morbidity and mortality. In a healthcare facility, the killer may be infection; so, the epidemiologists search for the source of the outbreak. They investigate the whos, the wheres, the whats, the whens, and the whys of infection, looking for patterns. Only when those answers are revealed can an epidemic begin to be controlled.

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BayCare's nine-hospital system has licensed TheraDoc's ESP and a suite of Knowledge Modules that includes the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant® and ADE Assistant®. With a long-standing focus on reducing infections throughout its healthcare system, BayCare sought a standardized process for HAI surveillance, infection control, antimicrobial stewardship, adverse drug event prevention and medication safety. TheraDoc's real-time surveillance and reporting capabilities, infection identification, and ability to integrate other hospital data without significant customization were evaluated by BayCare as their preferred solution to enhancing the quality and efficiency of care.

According to Dr. Denise Remus, Ph.D., RN, and Chief Quality Officer for BayCare Health System, "TheraDoc technology brings many benefits and efficiencies to enhancing infection control monitoring and reporting, providing logical alerts, and reducing paperwork - all of which will help us improve patient care. The technology's user interface was easy to maneuver and understand, and we saw real value and many resources in their solutions."

"As the largest non-profit healthcare system in the Tampa Bay area," added Remus, "BayCare sees TheraDoc technology as another tool and resource to improve the quality of care we provide to our community."

PeaceHealth's six hospitals in the Pacific Northwest will also utilize TheraDoc's ESP and its complete suite of Knowledge Modules: Infection Control Assistant, Antibiotic Assistant, ADE Assistant and Clinical Alerts Assistant®, with immediate implementation slated for July 2008. In 2003, the health system first implemented TheraDoc's ESP, Antibiotic Assistant, ADE Assistant and Clinical Alerts Assistant to enhance antimicrobial stewardship and patient care at two of its six hospitals. The system-wide implementation of the Infection Control Assistant will allow PeaceHealth to take advantage of TheraDoc's automated, comprehensive, work-flow centric infection surveillance and reporting technologies, improving surveillance efficiency and productivity, as well as reducing the paperwork of infection control practitioners.

"TheraDoc's real-time infection surveillance software is the logical next step toward empowering infection prevention and control," said Jette Hogenmiller PhD, ARNP, CDE, and System Quality Improvement Manger in the Infection Control department at PeaceHealth. "Its efficiencies in data surveillance, workflow enhancement, ease of use and, most importantly, real-time reporting capabilities, will enable us to stay ahead of the curve with infection management as well as support our commitment to excellence in patient care."

TheraDoc president and CEO, Stan Pestotnik said, "We are delighted to work with both PeaceHealth and BayCare Health Systems in advancing their patient safety and quality initiatives through our Clinical Intelligence^TM system. TheraDoc has a non-negotiable adherence to healthcare industry standards and best practice solutions that improve patient safety and provide measureable results and improved financial outcomes."

Pestotnik added that the ability of TheraDoc technology to identify and prevent infections and support clinical decision making is of particular importance given new regulations imposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) starting October 1, 2008. Under these new regulations, hospitals will no longer be reimbursed for costs related to preventable conditions, including HAIs and some medical errors.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc technology has been licensed by more than 200 hospitals in 30 states, plus the District of Columbia. Among these are Johns Hopkins, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Mayo Clinic-Florida, University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS), Chicago Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Emory Healthcare in Atlanta and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center. Hospitals using TheraDoc technology range from community hospitals with under 100 beds to integrated delivery networks (IDNs) with more than 3,700 beds, academic and VA medical centers, as well as children's and oncology specialty hospitals.

About BayCare Health System
BayCare is a family of health care providers consisting of the nine leading not-for-profit hospitals in the Tampa Bay region. With 17,000 employees and other health care services, BayCare is the largest, community-based health system in the region. BayCare's nine hospitals are: Mease Countryside, Mease Dunedin, Morton Plant, Morton Plant North Bay, St. Anthony's, St. Joseph's, St. Joseph's Children's, St. Joseph's Women's and South Florida Baptist. On the web: www.baycare.org.

About PeaceHealth Health System
The Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace have been providing health care to communities in the Pacific Northwest since 1890, when two Sisters traveled west from New Jersey to establish a hospital in Bellingham, Wash. In 1976 they consolidated the various health care ministries in their Western Province into a single not-for-profit system, adopting the name PeaceHealth in 1994.

Today PeaceHealth operates six hospitals, medical groups, a chemical dependency program, health care joint ventures, and other services in southeast Alaska, northwest Washington, southwest Washington/northwest Oregon, Oregon's Willamette Valley, and Oregon's central coast. System headquarters are in Bellevue, Wash. A system board sets overall direction, but each of the five regions has its own local governing board with responsibility to set local policy. The regions are also tied by a shared mission and values.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

Automated surveillance technology is an amazing tool and certainly one whose time has come. Mandatory reporting of infections and the coming changes in reimbursement by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) highlight the need for advanced, and timelier, tracking of infections. Automated surveillance of infections has so many advantages over manual tracking, advantages that can result in the two things we all want most: fewer medical errors and better care for patients.

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GIVEN REPORTS that as many as 2 million patients in the U.S. each year develop nosocomial infections, hospitals are looking for ways to speed up the diagnosis of infections and intervene more quickly.

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Modern infection control practitioners (ICPs) need advanced techniques for detecting outbreaks, surveillance, screening and tracking. Innovative developments offer refined techniques to curtail healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs).

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SALT LAKE CITY, March 25, 2008 – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center (CC) has joined an increasing roster of leading hospitals and health care systems in the US electing to license the innovative clinical solutions developed by TheraDoc. The NIH CC and TheraDoc will implement knowledge modules designed to provide advanced tools for active infection surveillance, antimicrobial stewardship, adverse drug event monitoring and documentation, and critical care at the 250-bed treatment and research hospital.

Once implemented, the TheraDoc Expert System will provide an intuitive interface through which context-specific clinical data will be easily evaluated, confirmed and acted upon. It will combine patient- and disease-specific data with best-practice guidelines. It will also translate the data into actionable patient information, and push it securely to clinicians in real-time. TheraDoc brings relevant information into a single view, reducing the time it takes to access and utilize data, enabling better decision-making and saving clinicians' valuable time.

TheraDoc president and CEO, Stan Pestotnik, credits the company's unique ability to present patient information, best practice guidelines and medical knowledge in real-time, clinician specific views with attracting the attention of the foremost US healthcare organizations. "These hospitals utilize state-of-the-art technology that supports the delivery of high-quality healthcare to all their patients," said Pestotnik. "As TheraDoc seamlessly connects onsite with a hospital's existing systems, it enables immediate focused access to actionable patient information. Clinicians know about changes in patient condition and significant events faster, with more and better information pushed to them in a manner and format of their choosing. The consistent use of these technologies to support clinicians and hospital initiatives will further improve the quality and safety of patient care in any hospital."

The ability of TheraDoc solutions to help infection control practitioners (ICPs) to clinically identify, confirm and document infections, reduce the time it takes to identify patient specific needs, and create accurate internal and external reports will now be used in a variety of new conditions with CC patients. This will also be true for infectious disease physicians and pharmacists using TheraDoc to optimize the utilization of antimicrobials by monitoring for drug/bug mismatches, renal dosing, IV to PO switch candidates and targeted drugs. The unique feedback that the CC can provide in these scenarios and a multitude of others will be a great benefit to the TheraDoc development organization and ultimately all its client hospitals and their patients.

TheraDoc solutions include the Expert System Platform®, knowledge modules and clinical tools. TheraDoc's current offerings include the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, Clinical Alerts Assistant®, Rounds Assistant®, Intervention Assistant® and EZ Alerts Assistant^TM.

TheraDoc continues to design and develop additional solutions to add to and further leverage the standardized patient information it creates and its Expert System Platform.

NO ENDORSEMENT OF ANY ORGANIZATION, PRODUCT OR SERVICE MENTIONED HERE IS INTENDED BY THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH OR ITS EMPLOYEES OR SHOULD BE INFERRED.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, March 11, 2008 – TheraDoc, Inc., a Salt Lake City-based clinical informatics company that develops and implements real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support systems designed to enhance medical decision making saw significant growth in 2007.

The Company's rapid revenue growth has been driven in part by a broad range of healthcare organizations choosing TheraDoc as their preferred knowledge solution. These organizations range from small forward looking rural hospitals to large and complex academic and multi-facility healthcare organizations, all looking for the best technologies to aid in their pursuit of medical excellence. Many of these facilities are recognized as healthcare quality leaders by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO), the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4), and other healthcare quality groups. These hospitals have chosen to implement the TheraDoc clinical decision support solutions, including TheraDoc's Expert System Platform® (ESP), the Infection Control Assistant® (ICA) Antibiotic Assistant® (AA), Adverse Drug Event Assistant® (ADEA), Clinical Alerts Assistant® (CAA), Rounds Assistant®, (RA), Intervention Assistant® (IA) and EZ Alerts Assistant^TM (EZA).

The real-time surveillance, identification, guidance, bench marking, and reporting technologies developed by TheraDoc help hospitals prevent and control infections, alert clinicians to adverse events and changes in patient condition, select evidence-based treatments and meet state-mandated reporting of hospital-acquired infections (HAI). They also help organizations reduce the associated costs and improve financial outcomes.

New Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) reimbursement guidelines along with increasing state - and federally - mandated reporting requirements in 2007 added to provider initiatives to drive demand for TheraDoc technologies, a trend that is expected to continue as these same market forces strengthen and accelerate in 2008. For example, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania became the first state to pass legislation (ACT 52) requiring hospitals to adopt an electronic surveillance for infectious disease prevention and control. This initiative and the CMS non-reimbursement of costs associated with eight never events (three infectious diseases) resulted in a 68 percent increase in number of hospitals licensed for TheraDoc solutions in Pennsylvania.

Hospitals in 30 states and the District of Columbia have licensed TheraDoc technology to provide continuous patient-safety surveillance and real-time, patient-specific advice for tens of thousands of beds and close to 30 million inpatients and outpatients. Clients using the TheraDoc technology platforms include academic medical centers, community hospitals, children's hospitals, cancer specialty facilities, VA Hospitals and integrated delivery networks.

2007 Milestones at a Glance

On May 1, 2007, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued US patent 7213009 for "Systems and methods for manipulating medical data via a decision support system" and on June 12, 2007, the USPTO awarded TheraDoc a second patent, US patent 7230529, for "System, method, and computer program for interfacing an expert system to a clinical information system."

Version 4.0, the newest release of the TheraDoc Expert System Platform® (ESP) was designed and has been launched to meet the security and functional requirements of multi-facility and IDN customers through enhanced data access, security, scalability, and reporting features. This software is currently installed or is being implemented in five of TheraDoc's many IDN clients, representing 35 hospitals, with 11 in production, including CHS, Lifespan-Rhode Island Hospital, and OSF.

The University of Utah - Public Health Program, one of the top 10 programs of its kind in the country, entered a long-term partnership with TheraDoc to support the University's Public Health curriculum. The TheraDoc Public Health Education Endowment, a $10,000 gift, was contributed to teach core courses in the University's Public Health and to bring in a distinguished lecturer each year as the endowment grows.

TheraDoc sponsored a Webinar hosted by Healthcare Informatics with information presented by CMS and UPMC that addressed quality of care and Medicare reimbursement changes to help hospitals understand the impact of the latest Medicare changes and the role IT can play in helping to reduce and prevent hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) and other medical errors. During the original live broadcast, nearly 1,000 healthcare professionals from a variety of hospital departments, including hospital CIO's, risk managers, quality improvement staff, IT managers, CFO's, infection control practitioners, Medicare/Medicaid compliance staff, chief medical officers, and other C-level executives, were educated about the recent Medicare hospital reimbursement reforms.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, February 20, 2008 – TheraDoc is pleased to announce the recent addition of three new integrated delivery networks (IDN) and multi-hospital provider organizations to its clientele. Emory Healthcare, WellSpan Health, and Kootenai Health, have selected TheraDoc to provide enhanced decision support capabilities within their hospitals to improve quality of care.

"Our patients will benefit from the integration of consistent, timely, and comparable patient information across the enterprise of our network," said Dr. James Steinberg, Infectious Disease Physician at Emory Healthcare.

The TheraDoc solutions soon to be implemented will enable clinicians to view current and historical patient information in the context of emerging care decisions. By providing instant access to information from across their network and compare this with best practice guidelines, clinicians can more rapidly assess patient conditions, resulting in better patient care decisions.

"We have gotten used to the fact that information is now everywhere. Our solutions provide access to the right information at the right time and in an easy-to-use format, which allows caregivers to more rapidly respond to the needs of their patients," said Stan Pestotnik, President and co-founder of TheraDoc. "We are delighted to work with leading provider organizations and to be part of their ongoing efforts to continue improving the quality of patient care at their facilities and across the country."

The three IDNs and multi-hospital provider organizations join an ever increasing list of hospitals across the country implementing TheraDoc software. Current existing clients include:

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, PA; University of Pennsylvania Health System, Philadelphia, PA; Memorial Healthcare System, Hollywood, FL; Franciscan Health Systems, Tacoma, WA; PeaceHealth, Bellevue, WA; Lifespan, Providence, RI., and North Shore Long Island Jewish, NY., as well as an increasing number of VA Medical Centers across the country.

TheraDoc provides hospital organizations with automated real-time surveillance as well as reliable, efficient, individualized patient care management guidance. These capabilities along with its flexible, user-friendly benchmarking and reporting tools give organizations the information, and knowledge required to produce better financial outcomes and most importantly, superior care.

TheraDoc's current software offering includes tools for infection control, antimicrobial stewardship, adverse drug events, critical care, intervention tracking, rounds information retrieval and display and customized alerts building and execution.

About Emory HealthCare
Since 1905, Emory Healthcare has been at the forefront of medicine, putting cutting-edge interventional research and technology into lifesaving action. As the largest, most comprehensive health care system in Georgia, Emory Healthcare has 1,184 licensed patient beds, 9,000 employees and more than 20 health centers located throughout Metro Atlanta. For more information, please visit www.emoryhealthcare.org.

About WellSpan
WellSpan Health is an integrated health system serving the greater Adams-York County region. As a community-based, not-for-profit organization, WellSpan is dedicated to improving the health and well-being of the people it serves. For more information, please visit www.wellspan.org.

About Kootenai Health
KMC exists to meet the healthcare needs of North Idaho through service excellence, community leadership and compassionate care. Since 1966, KMC's mission has remained steadfast: To operate a not-for-profit system that uses all revenue over expenses to improve the health of the community through patient care, education, research, and community service. For more information, please visit www.kmc.org.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, December 10, 2007 – TheraDoc® (www.theradoc.com), a Salt Lake City-based medical informatics company, has been selected by Saint Vincent Health System, a fully integrated health care delivery network, for implementation at Saint Vincent Health Center, a 436-bed, not-for-profit, tertiary care hospital and regional medical center located in Erie, PA. Saint Vincent will utilize TheraDoc's patented solutions to provide real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support to augment Saint Vincent's well-established infection monitoring and control programs.

With the addition of Saint Vincent Health Center, TheraDoc technology will soon be implemented at 30 Pennsylvania hospitals, including facilities from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia, West Penn Allegheny Health System in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia's Jefferson Health System.

Saint Vincent Health System, nationally recognized as a health care quality leader by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO), and The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4), has chosen to implement the TheraDoc Expert System Platform® (ESP) along with the Infection Control Assistant® (ICA).

TheraDoc's ESP technology leverages real-time clinical data from multiple sources within the hospital, including information from ADT, microbiology, lab, pharmacy, radiology, and surgery. The ICA combines a complete workflow tool for infection control practitioners (ICPs) with its continuous surveillance, intelligent alerts and timely analysis of individual infections and outbreaks. This helps ICPs to prevent infections, better manage isolations and precautions, more quickly find and confirm infections, more efficiently conduct MRSA screening protocols, identify trends and initiate interventions. This access to more-timely and better information coupled with knowledge provides automated and enhanced internal and external electronic reporting, and eliminates hours of manual tasks resulting in improved patient safety and quality of care, as well as better financial outcomes.

Over the past 15 years, Saint Vincent Health System has been successful in reducing the number of infectious disease outbreaks using technology developed in-house. In striving to further improve its infection control programs, however, the organization looked to the marketplace for the latest technology.

"When we conducted our review, TheraDoc presented the only solution that truly enhanced our current capacity to monitor, manage, prevent and report hospital-acquired infections (HAIs)," said Howard Nadworny, MD, hospital epidemiologist, Division of Infectious Diseases at Saint Vincent Health System. "Their robust, real-time technology and reporting systems will also allow our ICPs to spend less time on surveillance and more time on intervention."

"Our infection control nurses at Saint Vincent are constantly inundated with paperwork and truly need ways to streamline processes for effective infection control programs," adds Saint Vincent Infection Control Coordinator, Terry Kalgren, RN, BSN, CIC. "TheraDoc technology not only significantly reduces this paperwork, it also allows us to customize reports to meet the requirements of PHC4 and the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN)."

In Pennsylvania, hospitals are required to report all types of HAIs, as well as other related quality-of-care measures, to both NHSN and PHC4. These state mandates also require electronic surveillance systems to be compatible with NHSN, a compliance that TheraDoc meets by incorporating NHSN infection definitions into its system for reporting and identification of infections.

Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and CEO said, "We are privileged to implement our technology to further improve patient safety measures at Saint Vincent Health System. TheraDoc has a non-negotiable adherence to healthcare industry standards and best practice solutions in our effort to improve patient safety and care, along with financial outcomes for healthcare institutions and their patients."

As of December 1, 2007, a rapidly increasing list of client hospitals, including a significant number of the country's premiere healthcare organizations in 29 states and the District of Columbia, were licensed for TheraDoc technology to provide continuous patient-safety surveillance and clinical decision support to 1.9 million inpatient admissions and 26+ million outpatient visits. Clients using TheraDoc technology range from community hospitals with under 100 beds to integrated delivery networks (IDNs) with more than 3,700 beds, academic and VA medical centers, as well as children's and oncology specialty hospitals.

About Saint Vincent Health System
Saint Vincent Health System is a fully integrated health care delivery network that includes a 400+bed hospital in Erie, Pa. as its flagship; a 32-bed hospital in Westfield, NY; the region's busiest same-day surgery center; a medical group made up of 32 practices and specialty clinics; a home health care program and an outpatient imaging center. Saint Vincent is committed to compassion and excellence in the delivery of a continuum of world-class, holistic health care.

About Saint Vincent Health Center
Saint Vincent Health Center, selected as one of the Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania, is a 436 bed not-for-profit tertiary care facility located in Erie, PA. Saint Vincent, founded in 1875 by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Northwestern Pennsylvania as the area's first hospital is now the region's third largest employer with 2,900 employees. Saint Vincent has earned national recognition as a health care quality leader by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, and The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. The hospital has consistently scored in the top ten percent among hospitals in the nation on a number of quality measures.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, October 9, 2007 – A free Webinar presented to help hospitals understand the impact of the latest Medicare changes and the role IT can play in helping to reduce and prevent hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) and other medical errors is available through September 2008 at www.theradoc.com. The panel presentation, titled "New Medicare Medical Error Reimbursement Exclusions: Tracking and Preventing Errors with IT," features speakers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).

The program is hosted by Healthcare Informatics and sponsored by TheraDoc®. During the original live broadcast, September 18, nearly 1,000 healthcare professionals from a variety of hospital departments, including hospital CIO's, risk managers, quality improvement staff, IT managers, CFO's, infection control practitioners, Medicare/Medicaid compliance staff, chief medical officers, and other C-level executives, were educated about the recent Medicare hospital reimbursement reforms.

Effective October 2008, Medicare will no longer pay the extra costs of treating a specific group of preventable errors, injuries and infections that occur in hospitals, a decision that will significantly impact hospital revenue. Beginning with discharges that occur on or after October 1, 2007, hospitals are required to document and report a Present on Admission (POA) code for all billed diagnoses. If a condition was not present on admission, reimbursement will be reduced accordingly for costs associated with that condition beginning October 1, 2008.

With these new rules, Medicare hopes to motivate hospitals to increase the quality of care and reduce preventable medical errors. In order for clinicians to make better decisions that will enhance patient safety and eliminate errors, they need tools that will provide them with the ability to see pertinent patient information in the context of best practice guidelines. Without technologies that perform surveillance and push information to caregivers in real-time, alerting them to emerging changes in patient condition and other issues needing intervention, it will be difficult to make better clinical decisions and significant strides in quality improvement.

"We understand that a lot of systems changes will need to be undertaken," says Patricia E. Brooks, RHIA, senior technical advisor, Hospital and Ambulatory Policy Group, CMS, "We will be working with and educating hospitals to make this transition smooth."

Brooks participated in an interagency workgroup, which included the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the injury prevention and disease control community, to identify the proposed list of conditions non-present on admission that will no longer qualify for extra reimbursement under the Medicare Severity diagnosis related-groups (MS-DRGs) as of October 1, 2008.

"While hospitals are required to submit POA codes beginning October 1, 2007, we want to allow time for systems changes to take place," says Stuart J. Barranco, senior technical analyst, Division of Institutional Claims Processing, CMS, who was responsible for drafting the present-on-admission billing requirements used by CMS' standard systems. "We will not immediately issue penalties for missing codes, but we will begin sending alerts effective January 1, 2008. After April 1, 2008, claims with missing POA codes will be returned."

Tamra E. Merryman, UPMC's vice president of quality improvement and innovation, addresses ways in which hospitals can better monitor, track, manage and reduce HAIs and other medical errors to improve patient safety. "The healthcare system of the future will provide the right care at the right time in the right way... every time," says Merryman. "Our goal is to achieve perfect care and we can do this by focusing on quality outcomes."

A leader in patient care and safety, and one of the leading academic medical centers in the United States, UPMC maintains its high standards of care by utilizing multiple technologies to significantly improve patient safety, decrease HAIs and other medical errors and reduce associated costs. To meet these high standards and increasing federal and state reporting requirements, UPMC selected technology by TheraDoc, a Salt Lake City-based clinical informatics company that develops and implements real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support technologies.

"We have found TheraDoc solutions to be absolutely stunning and exceptional," says Merryman. "TheraDoc automates the work of an infection control nurse by providing real-time surveillance and presenting information in a decision-supported manner, thereby allowing us to identify, treat and report more effectively and efficiently."

UPMC has implemented TheraDoc technology in six of its 19 hospitals with future plans to install TheraDoc solutions in its remaining facilities. UPMC has also made a significant investment in TheraDoc and will work with the company to add new capabilities to its products.

TheraDoc representatives Scott Walker, MBA, JD, vice president, strategic development, and Aldo Tinoco, MD, clinical solutions executive director, provide additional information on how TheraDoc's patented expert systems can be utilized by hospitals to help prevent HAIs and other medical errors through enhanced clinical decision making.

"We are thrilled to bring this important presentation to hospitals facing more stringent reinforcement policies," notes Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and CEO. "TheraDoc technology truly provides a solution that is uniquely positioned to help hospitals reduce occurrences of issues related to quality of care and patient safety, therefore reducing the number of non-reimbursable conditions outlined by the newly mandated Medicare reimbursement exclusions."

TheraDoc's real-time surveillance, identification, guidance, measurement and reporting technologies help hospitals to prevent and control infections, alert clinicians to adverse events and changes in patient condition, select evidence-based treatments and meet mandated reporting requirements. These technologies provide clinicians the needed support to increase the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care, which improves both clinical and financial outcomes for those hospitals using them.

As of August 31, 2007,152 hospitals representing over 37,000 beds had licensed TheraDoc technology to provide continuous patient-safety surveillance for their patients and real-time, patient-specific clinical decision support for 1.6+ million inpatient admissions and 26+ million outpatient visits. Clients using TheraDoc technology platforms include academic medical centers, community hospitals, VA Hospitals and integrated delivery networks in 29 states and the District of Columbia.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

TheraDoc president and CEO, Stan Pestotnik, credits the company's ability to support the VA's national initiative on MRSA prevention - "Getting To Zero", along with its capacity to help reduce infections and inappropriate antibiotic usage, as the basis for the VA's selection.

"MEDVAMC provides exceptional healthcare to our deserving veterans and we are honored to collaborate with them in providing state-of-the-art technology that will further enhance the quality and safety of our veterans' care," said Pestotnik. "TheraDoc's integration with the VA's VistA®/CPRS system enables real-time focused access to patient data and knowledge that supports enhanced clinical decision making. With the MRSA initiative and the continued push within the VA to reduce infections and improve antimicrobial management, TheraDoc is uniquely positioned to make a difference."

MEDVAMC is part of a select group of VA Hospitals that is actively studying the impact of and educating others about the MRSA Screening protocol issued early this year by the VA Central Office. VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System where the protocol and initiative originated and VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, both TheraDoc clients, are also contributing significantly to this national effort to reduce MRSA infections. The Atlanta VA Medical Center and VA Salt Lake City Health Care System also number among the VA Hospitals utilizing TheraDoc solutions to enhance patient safety and care measures.

To enhance its patient safety initiatives, MEDVAMC will implement TheraDoc's patented Expert System Platform® and two of its knowledge modules, the Infection Control Assistant® and Antibiotic Assistant®.

The Infection Control Assistant helps infection control practitioners (ICPs) to clinically identify, confirm and document infections. It also reduces the time it takes to identify patient-specific needs and create accurate internal and external reports. As workflow efficiency and information access are improved, ICPs can spend more time educating others and making patient interventions, which will help prevent and mitigate infections.

The Antibiotic Assistant helps optimize the utilization of antimicrobials by monitoring patient-specific pharmacy information in conjunction with lab and microbiology results for drug/bug mismatches, renal dosing, IV to PO switch candidates and targeted drugs. Intelligent alerts will quickly notify designated clinicians as soon as this information is available. Using the hospital's formulary and TheraDoc-generated antibiograms, the Antibiotic Assistant's unique Wizard will deliver evidence-based treatment recommendations for a wide-range of syndromes to requesting clinicians.

These technologies are configured to provide MEDVAMC, and other VA Hospitals, with multiple infection prevention and control and antimicrobial management capabilities. Important among these are the identification of screening vs regular MRSA cultures; re-admission alerting for multi-drug resistant organisms (MDRO), including MRSA; alerts for admissions without a screening culture; alerts for MRSA and other MDRO infections; antimicrobial optimization for MRSA and MDRO's; transmission tracking tools and reporting capabilities; and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) definitions for identification, documentation and reporting (National Health Safety Network (NHSN) benchmarking and reporting).

Notably, TheraDoc technology brings relevant information into a single view, reducing the time it takes to access and utilize data, enabling better decision making, and saving clinicians' valuable time.

Additional system components offered by TheraDoc include the ADE Assistant®, which monitors for adverse drug events and identifies intervention opportunities, and the Clinical Alerts Assistant^TM, an intelligent alerting system that delivers critical clinical data to clinicians in real -time.

TheraDoc is dedicated to helping VA Hospitals reach their patient care goals and continues to design and develop additional solutions to add to its real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support systems.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

REDWOOD SHORES, CALIFORNIA, August 17, 2007 – TheraDoc® (www.theradoc.com) is a small company with a big mission - to save lives and enhance patient care by promoting improved clinical decision-making in hospitals across North America. By enabling the real-time collection, aggregation and analysis of data at every stage of a patient's journey through a hospital, the TheraDoc Expert System manages patient information, focuses clinicians' attention and provides guidance that improves patient care. This combination of real-time surveillance with real-time decision support requires a database that can cope with high transaction rates and simultaneous swift aggregation and analysis. This is why TheraDoc selected Oracle® Database as the repository at the heart of its offering.

TheraDoc's patented Expert System Platform® (ESP) collects data from a multitude of sources such as patient location (ADT - Admission, Discharge and Transfer), pharmacy, and laboratory orders and test results, utilizing Oracle's Database Advanced Queuing technology to process patient events. Then TheraDoc's selection of specialized Knowledge Modules use expert systems to process rules based on best-practice guidelines in several categories. These Knowledge Modules include the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, Clinical Alerts Assistant^TM, and the ADE Assistant® (Adverse Drug Events). Any system that deals with the very sensitive information required for real-time patient care needs a totally reliable place to store its data. For TheraDoc, Oracle Database was the logical choice.

"When we had to make a decision on the database in the year 2000, selecting Oracle was easy," said Jonathan Olson, Chief Technology Officer of TheraDoc. "No other database could offer the transaction processing capabilities combined with the simultaneous aggregation that our systems need. Reliability is obviously of paramount importance, and Oracle has a proven track record there also. Finally, there were specific functional areas, like Advanced Queuing, which were only available in Oracle."

Although it is a small company of about 60 employees, TheraDoc's impact is nationwide. The organizations selecting its system support patient care in over 39,000 beds and for millions of in- and out-patient visits in 152 hospitals in 29 states. Some of these healthcare facility sites include Johns Hopkins Hospital, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), Mayo Clinic-Florida, University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS), Nebraska's Great Plains Regional Medical Center, Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital and several hospitals in the VA system. The scale of healthcare organizations is also vast, ranging from 50 beds to 3,500 beds.

"The scalability of Oracle Database means that its performance is the least of our worries," continued Olson. "The database will scale smoothly from our smallest system, based on a single processor, to our largest, currently a Unix machine with 10 processors. We can support all of our hospitals with a single Database Administrator, using either the Oracle Database Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition, depending upon the hospital's needs."

TheraDoc has a non-negotiable adherence to medical informatics standards. This is the key to connectivity and interoperability with multiple internal and external information systems, as well as to accurate and immediate delivery of real-time patient information and best-practice knowledge to clinicians.

"Both TheraDoc and Oracle have the same commitment to standards-based software," said Olson. "This makes it much easier to keep our systems up to date as software development and the healthcare industry evolve. The capabilities within Oracle Database make it easier, faster and cheaper to develop our products, and Oracle's embedded license policy further enables us to make a truly cost-effective proposition to hospitals everywhere in North America."

TheraDoc is a member of OraclePartnerNetwork.

About the Oracle PartnerNetwork
Oracle PartnerNetwork is a global business network of more than 19,500 companies who deliver innovative software solutions based on Oracle software. Through access to Oracle's premier products, education, technical services, marketing and sales support, the Oracle PartnerNetwork program provides partners with the resources they need to be successful in today's global economy. Oracle partners are able to offer to their customers, leading-edge solutions backed by Oracle's position as the world's largest enterprise software company. http://oraclepartnernetwork.oracle.com

About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

About TheraDoc, Inc.
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. For more information, visit the TheraDoc Web site: www.theradoc.com

Trademarks
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. TheraDoc®, Expert System Platform®, Infection Control Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, and Clinical Alerts Assistant^TM are registered trademarks of TheraDoc, Inc. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SALT LAKE CITY, July 23, 2007 – Two Pennsylvania-based hospital organizations, Allegheny General Hospital (AGH) in Pittsburgh and its Suburban Campus in nearby Bellevue, and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital (TJUH), Philadelphia, have selected real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support systems provided by TheraDoc®, a clinical informatics company headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT. This brings to 20 the number of Pennsylvania hospital facilities utilizing TheraDoc technology, adding to implementations at 14 University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) facilities and the three-hospital group comprising the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) in Philadelphia.

TheraDoc technology leverages data from multiple sources within the hospital (ADT, microbiology, lab, pharmacy, radiology, surgery, scheduling and vitals monitoring) to power an automated surveillance solution that accurately identifies infections and their cause. The technology is widely embraced in Pennsylvania, which has mandated reporting of all types of hospital-acquired infections (HAI), as well as other related quality-of-care measures. Newly passed Pennsylvania Senate legislation also mandates electronic surveillance systems be compatible with the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), a compliance TheraDoc meets by incorporating NHSN infection definitions into its system.

TheraDoc is also participating in a CDC pilot project to automate the reporting of infection rates to NHSN. This will make submitting infection reports to NHSN 'push button simple' for AGH and TJUH, as well as other TheraDoc customers in Pennsylvania and across the country. By supporting standards for infection surveillance, meeting state reporting requirements and eliminating duplicate entry, TheraDoc infection control software enables hospitals to focus on preventing infections while reducing the time it takes to perform these responsibilities.

Allegheny General Hospital

Allegheny General Hospital (AGH), an 829-bed academic health center, is a member of the West Penn Allegheny Health System and affiliated with Philadelphia-based Drexel University College of Medicine. AGH will implement the patented TheraDoc Expert System Platform® (ESP) and its full suite of Knowledge Modules to address patient-safety threats, including hospital-acquired infections, antimicrobial-resistant diseases and adverse drug events. TheraDoc's Infection Control Assistant® is implemented at AGH and will shortly be in full productive use.

According to Dr. Andrew Sahud, attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases; Chairman of Infection, Prevention and Control Committee, and assistant professor of the Drexel University College of Medicine, AGH selected TheraDoc because it provides the best tools for focusing attention on reducing HAIs and improving patient safety.

"TheraDoc technology is like a high-powered zoom lens," said Dr. Sahud. "It is the ultimate tool for manipulating, interpreting and understanding infection data in our hospital, while also giving us the flexibility to focus on one item in the distance, see the entire horizon, or take a retrospective look back on where a trend began. It is very user-intuitive and provides clinicians with the ability to set parameters for individualized queries and antibiograms."

Cheryl Herbert, Director, Infection Prevention at AGH adds, "The success that we have achieved in tracking and reducing hospital-acquired infections over the past five years will be further enhanced by the new capability that this technology affords us. We greatly appreciate the fact that TheraDoc has never forgotten the need for clinical input on the data it delivers. Its dynamic technology provides clinicians with the real-time information they need without taking away their decision-making power. We also value that they successfully apply current CDC criteria to everything they do."

Thomas Jefferson University Hospital

Thomas Jefferson University Hospital (TJUH) will utilize TheraDoc's Expert System Platform and Infection Control Assistant to enhance its rigorous infection monitoring and control programs throughout the hospital.

"In our review of clinical decision support and infection control vendors, TheraDoc technology was by far the most-sophisticated and powerful program available," said Dr. Phyllis Flomenberg, Attending Physician in Infectious Diseases, Associate Professor of Medicine, and Director of TJUH's Infection Control Department. "Knowledge is empowerment and the more quickly real-time data can be provided, the better we can care for our patients. Without this technology, infection control is extremely labor intensive. TheraDoc merges all the sources of critical data and places it at our fingertips."

Rachel Sorokin, M.D., Associate Chief Medical Officer, TJUH, explains further. "At Jefferson, we have always diligently monitored hospital-acquired and community-acquired infections in every discipline within our institution. This effort, combined with PHC4 mandatory reporting of HAI's, has resulted in an enormous workload requiring a tremendous amount of personnel. TheraDoc technology not only monitors type, location and movement of an infection within a hospital - freeing our infection control personnel to serve on the floor where we most need them to be, its infrastructure is also continuously upgraded and updated with the latest expert knowledge."

TheraDoc - Non-Negotiable Adherence to Healthcare Industry Standards

TheraDoc's real-time surveillance, identification, guidance and reporting technologies not only help hospitals to prevent and control infections, they also support pharmacist workflow and communication for clinical activities and documentation; alert clinicians to adverse events and changes in patient condition and select evidence-based treatments. Additionally, these measures reduce associated costs and improve financial outcomes.

"We are privileged to add Allegheny General Hospital and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital to our growing number of hospital partners in Pennsylvania," said Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and CEO. "TheraDoc's non-negotiable adherence to healthcare industry standards and best-practice solutions are inherent in every element of our technology as we strive to improve patient safety and care, along with financial outcomes for healthcare institutions and their patients."

TheraDoc currently serves clients in 28 states ranging from community hospitals under 100 beds to integrated delivery networks (IDNs) with more than 3,700 beds. Academic medical centers as well as VA, children's, and oncology hospitals with their outpatient clinics also benefit from the life-saving solutions delivered by TheraDoc.

About Allegheny General Hospital

Founded in 1885, Allegheny General Hospital has earned an international reputation for excellence and innovation in the care of patients, medical education and research. Serving Pittsburgh and the surrounding five-state area, the 829-bed academic health center offers a wide array of medical and surgical services. Over the past eight years, Allegheny General has been recognized by U.S. News & World Report magazine as one of "America's Best Hospitals" for a number of clinical specialties, and has been lauded as one of America's top 25 medical centers by the AARP's Modern Maturity magazine.

A long-standing commitment to education and research remains a cornerstone of Allegheny General Hospital's philosophy, as evidenced by its affiliation with Philadelphia-based Drexel University College of Medicine and ongoing, innovative research studies in the neurosciences, medical oncology, human genetics, cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, orthopedics and trauma. A member of the West Penn Allegheny Health System, Allegheny General Hospital admits nearly 32,000 patients and logs about 56,000 emergency visits and 28,000 surgical procedures each year. Approximately 1,250 physicians and 4,600 employees share the hospital's commitment to excellence in patient care, medical education and research.

About Thomas Jefferson University Hospital

Begun 1825, Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals have 957 licensed, acute-care beds and major programs for a wide range of clinical specialties. The services of the academic medical center are delivered at several locations - Center City Philadelphia, Jefferson Hospital for Neuroscience, Methodist Hospital located in South Philadelphia, Jefferson HealthCARE - Voorhees in New Jersey, and several ambulatory care satellites and radiation therapy centers.

Formerly a division of Thomas Jefferson University, the hospital was separated from the university to become a founding member of the Jefferson Health System in 1995. In 1996, the hospital expanded its services to the community through a merger with Methodist Hospital, which became a division of Thomas Jefferson Hospitals. Today, the hospitals are committed to clinical excellence for patients, students and residents. Thomas Jefferson University Hospital continues to take pride in the quality and variety of health services provided to residents of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, the Delaware Valley and beyond. It is one of only a few hospitals in the United States that is both a Regional Trauma Center and a federally designated regional Spinal Cord Injury Center. For 17 consecutive years, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital has been rated as one of "America's Best Hospitals" for many specialties.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, July 9, 2007 – TheraDoc®, www.theradoc.com, a Salt Lake City-based clinical informatics company that develops and implements real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support systems to enhance clinical decision making, announced today that the standards-based core technology for the TheraDoc product line, the Expert System Platform® (ESP), is now patented.

On May 1, 2007, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued US patent 7213009 for "Systems and methods for manipulating medical data via a decision support system" and on June 12, 2007, the USPTO awarded TheraDoc a second patent, US patent 7230529, for "System, method, and computer program for interfacing an expert system to a clinical information system". TheraDoc originally filed for these patents September 9, 2003 and February 5, 2004, respectively.

"The issuance of these patents strengthens and solidifies TheraDoc's position as a leader in providing credible, standards-based solutions and market-leading product vision and execution," said Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and CEO. "We will continue working to improve the quality and safety of patient care while lowering associated costs through our nonnegotiable adherence to healthcare industry standards."

"TheraDoc is actively working to formalize relationships with recognized, forward-thinking systems vendors as well as help our clients fully leverage benefit and ROI on their IT infrastructure and clinical information systems. These patents will enhance and expand our HIT industry partnerships and create additional value for our shareholders," notes Pestotnik.

The Expert System Platform patented technology combines the ever-increasing volume of evidence-based medical knowledge with current and historical patient data delivered via standard real-time electronic interfaces. The ESP installed in the hospital's data center then analyzes these data to provide critical information support for clinicians-in real time. It provides instant access to patient information collected from the myriad of hospital IT systems and places it, along with alerts, notifications, clinical workflow tools and evidence-based guidelines and treatment recommendations, at a clinician's fingertips.

TheraDoc's real-time surveillance, identification, guidance and reporting technologies help hospitals to prevent and control infections; support pharmacist workflow and communication for clinical activities and documentation; alert clinicians to adverse events and changes in patient condition; select evidence-based treatments and meet state-mandated reporting of hospital-acquired infections (HAI). They also reduce associated costs and improve financial outcomes. Increasing state- and federally-mandated reporting requirements in 2006 were instrumental in driving demand for TheraDoc technologies resulting in record growth, a trend that has continued as these market forces are strengthening in 2007.

"Our hospital partners continue to recognize our leadership by adopting the TheraDoc Expert System Platform for aiding in the detection and prevention of potential patient harm," said Pestotnik. "Our patented and innovative, best-in-class solutions have earned the trust of a growing number of thought-leading healthcare organizations such as Johns Hopkins Hospital, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, University of Pennsylvania Health System, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Mayo Clinic - FL, VA Hospitals and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, June 25, 2007 – TheraDoc®, www.theradoc.com, a Salt Lake City-based clinical informatics company that develops and implements real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support systems to enhance clinical decision making, has expanded its technology to better serve multi-entity hospital systems, also known as Integrated Delivery Networks (IDN).

While multi-entity capabilities are already built into the patented TheraDoc Expert System Platform® (ESP), the newest 4.0 version is designed to better meet the security and functional requirements of multi-facility and IDN customers through enhanced data access security, scalability, and reporting features. Like previous versions, one installation of the 4.0 version in a client's data center supports multiple hospitals on one hardware platform. Beta and scalability testing were conducted at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) as part of the implementation process. The first wave of implementation consisting of data integration and validation for six UPMC hospitals has been successfully completed with two hospitals currently in production and the others to follow shortly.

New configurable security features limit user access to patient data for sensitive facilities and patient locations. This allows TheraDoc users to all work in the same environment, but each user only has access to the facilities or locations appropriate for the user's role. More robust support for CCOW (Clinical Context Object Workgroup) and support for LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) simplifies and reduces deployment costs by enabling single user signon and leveraging existing IT infrastructure for user authentication. Scalability testing has shown excellent support for all concurrent clinical users within a single software environment. Testing is expected to conclude in August, with a market release slated for September 2007.

"The robust multi-entity security features and functionality in version 4.0 will be a boon to both Integrated Delivery Network and direct hospital clients seeking best-in-class surveillance and expert systems to improve patient safety and care as well as reduce costs throughout their hospital system," said Michael Barton, Pharm.D., TheraDoc Senior Vice President, Knowledge and Product Development. "Its installation at one data center within the system will deliver real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support capabilities to all institutions within the network. In addition, corporate level users will be able to generate reports for benchmarking performance across all facilities in the network."

Barton also noted, "IDNs represent a significant and growing portion of our client base and the release of our version 4.0 software is a strategic investment to better support the functional, security and deployment needs of our IDN clients."

Currently, many TheraDoc clients utilizing this technology are IDNs, including University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, PA; West Penn Allegheny Health System, Pittsburgh, PA; University of Pennsylvania Health System, Philadelphia, PA; Memorial Healthcare System, Hollywood, FL; Franciscan Health Systems, Tacoma, WA; Peace Health, Eugene, OR; OSF Healthcare, Peoria, Illinois; Jewish Hospital and St. Mary's HealthCare, Louisville, KY; and Lifespan, Providence, RI. Two health systems, Peace Health and Franciscan Health, have utilized the company's original multi-entity technology since their implementations in 2003 and 2005, respectively.

TheraDoc's real-time surveillance, identification, guidance and reporting technologies help hospitals to prevent and control infections; support pharmacist workflow and communication for clinical activities and documentation; alert clinicians to adverse events and changes in patient condition; select evidence-based treatments and meet state-mandated reporting of hospital-acquired infections (HAI). They also reduce associated costs and improve financial outcomes. Increasing state- and federally mandated reporting requirements in 2006 were instrumental in driving demand for TheraDoc technologies resulting in record growth, a trend that is expected to continue as these same market forces strengthen in 2007.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

OSF, counted among the top 25 Integrated Healthcare Networks in the nation, will implement the ESP and Knowledge Modules throughout six of its seven acute care facilities located in Illinois and Michigan beginning with OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, IL

TheraDoc's Infection Control Assistant® (ICA) will provide automated, real-time infection surveillance, intelligent alerts, and timely analysis of infections that threaten patient safety. The ICA leverages clinical data from multiple sources - including real-time information from laboratory, radiology and surgery departments - promptly delivering relevant patient information and medical knowledge to an Infection Control Professional's fingertips.

Dr. Robert White, Chief Medical Officer of Clinical Informatics at OSF, stated, "OSF will utilize TheraDoc technology to improve current workflows and information management and, most importantly, the quality and safety of patient care. In our analysis of clinical decision support systems, TheraDoc was not only a natural fit with its business intelligence model for OSF and our caregivers' clinical decision support needs, it also provides the real-time infection surveillance and reporting solutions needed to comply with state mandatory reporting of hospital-acquired infections."

The Nebraska Medical Center will implement TheraDoc technology to enhance its long-standing Infection Control and Antimicrobial Stewardship programs. The Infection Control Assistant and Antibiotic Assistant's real-time patient information and decision-making tools will not only assist The Nebraska Medical Center in tracking important trends and maximizing patient care, they will also eliminate hours of manually collecting data and quickly focus clinicians' attention on patients and events requiring intervention.

"Our mission is to positively impact patient safety and outcome measures through the prudent use of antimicrobial agents and management of infectious disease," said Dr. Mark Rupp, Medical Director, Healthcare Epidemiology and Director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at The Nebraska Medical Center. "We believe that TheraDoc will be an invaluable tool in achieving this mission through its ability to create a comprehensive, real-time stream of data gathered from the pharmacy, microbiology lab, patient admissions, x-ray and other critical care departments."

In its search for clinical decision support technology, The Nebraska Medical Center utilized a 21-item checklist of design features that would support its Infection Control and Antimicrobial Stewardship programs. "TheraDoc technology provided solutions for the majority of the features we identified," added Elizabeth Hermsen, Pharm. D., M.B.A. "Its ability to provide real-time, point-of-care and patient-specific information, evidence-based recommendations and alerts, satisfied our Infection Control and Antimicrobial Stewardship initiatives. It truly was the only technology available that addressed our needs."Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and CEO, said, "We are privileged to implement our technology to further improve patient safety measures at both OSF Healthcare System and The Nebraska Medical Center. TheraDoc has a non-negotiable adherence to healthcare industry standards and best practice solutions in our effort to improve patient safety and care, along with financial outcomes for healthcare institutions and their patients."

About OSF Healthcare System
OSF HealthCare, owned and operated by The Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, Peoria, Illinois, includes OSF Healthcare System consisting of seven acute care facilities, one long-term care facility and two colleges of nursing. It also has a primary care physician network consisting of 194 physicians and 48 mid-level providers, known as OSF Medical Group. OSF HealthCare owns OSF Saint Francis, Inc., comprised of healthcare-related businesses, and OSF Healthcare Foundation, the philanthropic arm of OSF Healthcare System and OSF Home Care. Additionally, OSF HealthPlans, Inc., a subsidiary of OSF Saint Francis, Inc., is a licensed managed care company in the State of Illinois with about 80,000 members.

About The Nebraska Medical Center
With a reputation for excellence, innovation and extraordinary patient care, The Nebraska Medical Center has earned J.D. Power and Associates' Hospital of Distinction award two consecutive years. It has also been recognized with the 2006 Consumer Choice Award, a mark of patient satisfaction as selected by healthcare consumers, and has achieved Magnet recognition status for nursing excellence. As the teaching hospital for the University of Nebraska Medical Center, this 689 licensed bed academic medical center has an international reputation for providing solid organ and bone marrow transplantation services and is well known nationally and regionally for its oncology, neurology and cardiology programs. The Nebraska Medical Center can be found online at www.nebraskamed.com

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, June 19, 2007 – TheraDoc® Inc., a developer of clinical decision support and infection control technologies for the nation's leading medical centers, and the University of Utah - Public Health Program, one of the top 10 such programs in the country, recently announced a long-term partnership to support the University's Public Health core courses. A $10,000 gift, called the TheraDoc Public Health Education Endowment, will contribute to the University's Public Health teaching of core courses and eventually bringing in a distinguished lecturer each year as the endowment grows.

"As we prepare public health professionals for the workforce through a teaching program primarily funded by state allocations and supplemented by research grants, our need for public-private partnerships grows increasingly important," said George L. White, Jr., Ph.D., MSPH, Professor and Director of the Public Health Program at the University of Utah. "TheraDoc's gift is an invaluable tool in helping us serve the needs of our faculty and students. Further, their cutting-edge technologies are our hope for the future in dealing with public health threats. No other medical discipline impacts and improves the quality of people's lives as much as public health. One of the many ways we do this is through refining infection control and clinical decision support technologies in our hospitals."

"TheraDoc's work in the public health sector mirrors the Public Health Program's mission to promote and protect population health and safety with the ultimate goal of reducing risk and eliminating disease," said Stan Pestotnik, M.S., RPh, TheraDoc president and CEO. "With the looming shortage of public health professionals in our state, our goal is to help educate young people in this critical field. We are honored to provide this assistance and look forward to a long-term partnership with the Public Health Program."

A clinical informatics company that develops and implements real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support systems to improve the quality and safety of patient care, TheraDoc develops technology that is used by the country's leading hospitals, including Johns Hopkins Hospital, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Mayo Clinic-Florida, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, University of Pennsylvania Health System, University of Utah Hospital and several Veterans Administration Hospitals across the U.S.

Prior to founding TheraDoc, Pestotnik had a 20-year career as a clinical pharmacist, focusing on clinical epidemiology and infectious diseases, drug surveillance and medication safety, and medical informatics and outcomes research. He also served as Director of the Drug Surveillance and Safety Program in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Infectious Diseases at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, UT. A fierce advocate for the quality and safety of patient care, he dedicated himself to conceptualizing, designing and implementing computerized decision-support programs that enhanced antibiotic management by physicians and, thus, improved patient outcomes.

White envisions using the TheraDoc endowment to invite speakers with expertise in the areas of biostatistics, epidemiology, health services administration, infectious diseases, ethics, and social context of public health. As the endowment fund grows, it will have the capacity to fully support one or two core courses.

About the Public Health Program of the University of Utah

The Public Health Program of the University of Utah is considered one of the top public health programs in the United States (U.S. News & World Report, Graduate Schools, 1999 - 2006). The department offers degree programs for the Master of Public Health, MS in Public Health, and a Ph.D. in Public Health. Its faculty represents a broad range of expertise including cancer; HIV/AIDS; maternal and child health; injury, trauma and violence; infectious diseases; industrial hygiene; environmental and occupational medicine, and health services research. It maintains close collaborative ties with key institutions along the Wasatch Front including the Utah State Department of Health, Huntsman Cancer Institute, Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, Intermountain Health Care, the Thrasher Research Fund, and the Health Research Center of the University of Utah.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

Nothing can cause more havoc in a hospital than an infection. If left unchecked, it can sicken or kill dozens, perhaps even hundreds. The North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System is taking steps to combat the threat of infection – either accidental or intentional – by strengthening its emergency preparedness programs.

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With the state of Pennsylvania mandating that all infections be reported, we were faced with the challenge of gathering information from multiple databases, which was extremely time consuming.

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During the past 30 years the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has monitored two major patient safety issues—hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) and antibiotic resistance—through its National Nosocomial Infections Surveillance (NNIS) system..

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SALT LAKE CITY, February 27, 2007 – Building on its technical expertise in healthcare emergency preparedness, the Great Neck, NY-based North Shore-Long Island Jewish (LIJ) Health System received, through the efforts of U.S. Representative Peter King, a grant from the Department of Defense to expand its already extensive emergency preparedness and bioterrorism surveillance programs. A key component of this effort is strengthening North Shore-LIJ's internal surveillance and reporting capabilities regarding infectious pathogens isolated in the health system's laboratories and information generated in the emergency departments.

To support these surveillance activities as well as centralize microbiology data from the 15-hospital health system's various lab systems, North Shore-LIJ has selected TheraDoc® Inc. www.theradoc.com, a clinical informatics company that develops and implements real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support systems to improve the quality and safety of patient care at the country's leading hospitals.

"In addition to providing North Shore-LIJ with tools for hospital-based internal infection control monitoring and reporting, TheraDoc provides a tailor-made solution for converting our lab system's text-generated microbiology reports into discrete data that is usable for a variety of surveillance and emergency preparedness activities," said Michael Oppenheim, MD, VP and Chief Medical Information Officer for the North Shore-LIJ Health System. "Their technology will allow our infection control practitioners to spend more time on prevention and control activities as well as allow us to move our bioterrorism surveillance program to a new level as we implement and expand our surveillance of infectious diseases in our hospitals and communities."

TheraDoc's real-time, standards-based infection control software will eliminate the tedious manual review and collection of microbiology and ADT reports. TheraDoc further supports these control measures by providing tools for isolation management and Quick Guides to educate clinical staff on procedures for handling infected patients and preventing the spread of disease. With TheraDoc, North Shore-LIJ will significantly expand its surveillance systems while supporting additional management, control and reporting capabilities - all with existing staff.

TheraDoc will also work in tandem with FirstWatch, a real-time early warning system, in supporting key components of emergency preparedness for North Shore-LIJ's Center for Emergency Medical Services in Syosset, NY. TheraDoc's database will be leveraged by FirstWatch to perform data mining and analysis to identify potential outbreaks, as well as to provide graphic rendering of geographic disease activity in addition to providing real-time automated wireless notifications to emergency preparedness personnel. FirstWatch will also give North Shore-LIJ the ability to collaborate with agencies inside & outside of New York State, in seeing aggregated real-time data related to public health and public safety trends and patterns.

Brian O'Neil, senior VP of Emergency Medical Services, said, "In any major outbreak, time is of the essence in containing, isolating and treating illness. These two surveillance platforms, working in conjunction, will provide us the ability to see trends in real-time and respond more quickly. Using these two platforms we can quickly graph disease management from the point of entry into the healthcare system to the point of discharge. Not only does this information assist us with planning and allow us to provide quicker notifications and response, but it makes sound medical sense from an everyday quality perspective."

North Shore-LIJ Health System has developed one of our country's leading emergency management programs through its Center for Emergency Medical Services," notes TheraDoc president and CEO, Stan Pestotnik. "We are honored to assist them in serving the emergency preparedness needs of their network of hospitals, as well as state, county and city agencies."

About North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System

Headquartered in Great Neck, N.Y., the North Shore-LIJ Health System is the nation's third largest, non-profit, secular healthcare system, and cares for people of all ages throughout Long Island, Queens and Staten Island - a service area encompassing more than five million people. The health system includes 15 hospitals, four long-term care facilities, a medical research institute, four trauma centers, five home health agencies and dozens of outpatient centers. North Shore-LIJ facilities house more than 6,000 beds, and are staffed by over 8,000 physicians, 10,500 nurses and a total workforce of about 37,500 - the largest employer on Long Island and the ninth largest in New York City.

About FirstWatch

FirstWatch, currently deployed in 54 metro areas in North America, is a commercial off-the-shelf (cots) situational awareness and surveillance software system that, once configured to work with applicable data sources, will allow authorized users to securely monitor existing data systems for statistically significant occurrences in user-defined criteria -- from a situational awareness, homeland security, public health or operational standpoint.

Once a concerning volumetric or geographic trend (or pattern) is detected, the FirstWatch system will automatically alert user-defined personnel via email, pager, SMS (short text message) or fax. Alerted personnel can use the real-time FirstWatch information to determine the nature and significance of the occurrence, and take appropriate steps to warn and protect the public (as well as first responders), if necessary.

FirstWatch is designed to allow aggregation of data from multiple public safety & public health agencies (with disparate data sources) to provide authorized users with a true real-time, regionalized situational awareness perspective across geopolitical boundaries and operational areas. www.firstwatch.net.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, February 26, 2007 – TheraDoc® Inc. www.theradoc.com, a Salt Lake City-based clinical informatics company that develops and implements real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support systems to enhance clinical decision making, reports record growth in new contract value for 2006, an increase exceeding 525-percent.

TheraDoc's real-time surveillance, identification, guidance and reporting technologies help hospitals to prevent and control infections, alert clinicians to adverse events and changes in patient condition, select evidence-based treatments and meet state-mandated reporting of hospital-acquired infections (HAI). They also reduce the associated costs and improve financial outcomes. Increasing state- and federally mandated reporting requirements in 2006 were instrumental in driving demand for TheraDoc technologies, a trend that is expected to continue as these same market forces strengthen in 2007.

"Our hospital partners continue to recognize TheraDoc's leadership in product vision, execution, service and support by adopting the TheraDoc Expert System Platform for aiding in the detection and prevention of potential patient harm," said TheraDoc president and CEO, Stan Pestotnik. "Our innovative, best-in-class solutions have earned the trust of a growing number of thought-leading healthcare organizations such as Johns Hopkins Hospital, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, University of Pennsylvania Health System, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Mayo Clinic - FL, VA Hospitals and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We anticipate adding significantly to this esteemed roster of clients in 2007."

As of December 31, 2006, 139 hospitals representing 35,428 beds had licensed TheraDoc technology to provide continuous patient-safety surveillance of the 35,428 beds and real-time, patient-specific advice for 1.6 million inpatient admissions and 24+ million outpatient visits. Clients using the TheraDoc technology platforms include academic medical centers, community hospitals, VA Hospitals and integrated delivery networks throughout 26 states. TheraDoc welcomed their first freestanding pediatric hospital last year.

Also in 2006, and for the second consecutive year, the MountainWest Capital Network recognized TheraDoc among Utah's 100 fastest-growing companies. Its ranking increased to #16 from its debut ranking of #17 in 2005.

Clinical Advisory Boards Reorganized and Expanded

To assure objective, expert oversight of its best-in-class solutions and cutting-edge product development, TheraDoc took the opportunity to reorganize its Infectious Diseases Clinical Advisory Board (CAB) as well as create two new boards: the Infection Control and Prevention CAB and Adverse Drug Event CAB. Noted clinical and domain experts have agreed to chair these boards.

The Infectious Diseases CAB will be reorganized under the joint leadership of Dr. Neil Fishman, the Director of the Department of Healthcare Epidemiology and Infection Control and the Director of the Antimicrobial Management Program for the University of Pennsylvania Health System, and Dr. Merle Sande, Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington and a noted expert in infectious diseases and HIV management, as well as a TheraDoc co-founder.

Dr Trish M. Perl, Associate Professor of Medicine and Senior Hospital Epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University and a recognized expert in the surveillance, prevention and control of hospital-associated infections, will chair the newly created Infection Control and Prevention CAB, while Eric A. Pifer, M.D., Chief Medical Informatics Officer at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, will lead the new Adverse Drug Events CAB.

"TheraDoc is recognized for solution credibility and market-leading product vision and execution," stated Michael Barton, SVP of Knowledge and Product Development. "Our Clinical Advisory Boards are a key addition to strengthening and solidifying this position in 2007, and we are fortunate to draw upon the outstanding academic and professional expertise of these industry leaders."

According to Barton, the CAB chairs are actively working with TheraDoc to identify leading experts and key representatives to serve as CAB members in their respective domains.

Larry D. Grandia Joins TheraDoc Board

In 2006, TheraDoc added to its board of directors, Larry D. Grandia, healthcare IT executive for more than 25 years and former executive vice president and chief technology officer of Premier, Inc.

"Larry's rich background as founder, leader, task force member and board member of multiple organizations within the healthcare industry, coupled with his years of experience at Intermountain HealthCare, Inc. (a quality-leading, 22-hospital integrated delivery network located in Utah and Idaho), affords him insights and execution skills that will further solidify our position as the standard for clinical decision support and knowledge delivery solutions to the healthcare industry," said Pestotnik.

Grandia's professional recognition includes a 1995 Gold Award for Achievement in Managing Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and American Management Systems. He was awarded HIMSS' 1992 "CIO of the Year" (John E. Gall, Jr.) Award for outstanding contributions to the field of healthcare information management, and was among the "Most Influential in Healthcare IT" named by ADVANCE for Health Information Executives in October 1999. He won CIO magazine's CIO 100 Award in 1991.

Mandatory and Public Health Reporting

TheraDoc's real-time surveillance, identification, and reporting technologies are designed for a broad range of clinical activity and are increasingly being applied to documenting and reporting hospital-acquired infections. These solutions help hospitals meet mandatory HAI reporting requirements and comply with JCAHO and CMS core measures. TheraDoc's technology is live, or is being implemented, at 52 facilities in 7 of the 15 states where some form of mandatory HAI reporting is now required by law. There are also 8 additional facilities in 6 of the 7 states that have passed measures to study the best way to implement mandatory reporting prior to mandating it.

The CDC, DoD, VA Hospitals, state health departments, clinical studies and grant recipients are also benefiting from the data assets being created by TheraDoc clients. These uses include antimicrobial resistance tracking, early detection networks for infectious diseases and bioterrorism, an infectious disease reporting RHIO, aggregated electronic lab reporting, antimicrobial stewardship, infectious diseases management, adverse drug event tracking and signal efficiency, enhanced e-surveillance case definitions for infections, as well as other public health information needs.

TheraDoc successfully attracted a growing number of new clients in 2006 with clients now in 26 states. With its scaleable technology, TheraDoc's clients range from community hospitals under 100 beds to integrated delivery networks (IDNs) with over 3,700 beds. Academic medical centers as well as VA, children's, and oncology hospitals with their outpatient clinics are now benefiting from life-saving solutions delivered by TheraDoc.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, February 5, 2007 – The University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) has selected active infection surveillance and real-time injury detection and prevention systems provided by TheraDoc® Inc.

UPHS will also use TheraDoc to evaluate, enhance and monitor the optimization of antibiotic usage patterns. Given these capabilities, UPHS infectious diseases physicians are planning academic research projects through which they will evaluate the clinical interventions facilitated over time by TheraDoc. As an objective, the researchers plan to measure the impact of real-time interventions on the emergence and persistence of antimicrobial-resistant organisms.

Beyond helping UPHS to enhance its response to HAIs and its antimicrobial stewardship capabilities, TheraDoc will continuously monitor electronic patient records to identify infections in real-time. Concurrently, it will deliver the clinical data and relevant patient information that will assist UPHS clinicians in reducing and preventing healthcare-acquired infections.

To support the research projects, enable proactive, real-time infection management and prevention, and streamline internal and external infection rate reporting, TheraDoc will integrate its Expert System Platform® and Infection Control Assistant^TM on-site with the healthcare information systems at UPHS to leverage existing data assets.

Further enhancements will result as TheraDoc implements additional components of its injury detection and prevention systems, including the Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant® and Clinical Alerts Assistant^TM. These knowledge modules will help UPHS clinicians with their clinical decision-making and further enhance antimicrobial stewardship and management.

In addition, TheraDoc will assist clinicians in identifying adverse drug events by rapidly identifying intervention opportunities for patients at risk, notifying clinicians in real-time and delivering critical data via e-mail, handheld or pager.

Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and CEO, said, "We are privileged to implement our technology to further improve patient safety measures at the three hospitals that comprise the University of Pennsylvania Health System that are consistently ranked among the best in the nation." He further stated, "TheraDoc has a non-negotiable adherence to healthcare industry standards. It is interesting to note that our software is fully compliant with the comprehensive procurement guidelines established by UPHS and the State of Pennsylvania."

It takes more than just reporting numbers to reduce infection rates and increase the quality and safety of care for current and future patients. With TheraDoc software, clinicians will be well equipped to implement multiple quality improvement initiatives throughout the UPHS.

About The University of Pennsylvania Health System

Created in 1993, the 1,554-bed University of Pennsylvania Health System includes three hospitals, all of which have received numerous national patient-care honors [Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital; and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center]; a faculty practice plan; a primary-care provider network; two multi-specialty satellite facilities; and home care and hospice.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, January 22, 2007 – The Atlanta VA Medical Center (VAMC) has joined the increasing roster of Veterans Hospitals electing to license injury detection and prevention systems developed by TheraDoc® Inc. (www.theradoc.com). TheraDoc is implementing its active infection surveillance and antimicrobial stewardship tools at the 173-bed teaching hospital to enhance infection control, management and prevention measures.

TheraDoc president and CEO, Stan Pestotnik, credits the company's standards-based software and real-time capabilities with attracting the attention of premier healthcare organizations such as the Atlanta VAMC.

"This hospital utilizes state-of-the-art technology that supports the delivery of high-quality healthcare to our deserving veterans," said Pestotnik. "Our software will seamlessly connect onsite with the VA's VistA®/CPRS system to enable immediate focused access to patient data. With TheraDoc, clinicians can further improve the quality and safety of patient care."

TheraDoc injury detection and prevention systems include the Expert System Platform® and knowledge modules such as the Infection Control Assistant^TM and Antibiotic Assistant®. These will be integrated with Atlanta VAMC's clinical information systems to enhance the use of patients' electronic records and provide real-time data gathering, alerting and infection rate reporting capabilities.

Additional system components offered by TheraDoc include the ADE Assistant®, which monitors for adverse drug events and identifies intervention opportunities. Also available is the Clinical Alerts Assistant^TM, an intelligent alerting system through which critical clinical data is delivered to clinicians in real -time via e-mail or pager.

Once implemented at the Atlanta VAMC, the Expert System Platform will provide an intuitive interface through which context-specific clinical data will be easily collected, evaluated and acted upon. It will combine patient- and disease-specific data with best-practice guidelines, translate the data into actionable patient information, and push it securely to clinicians in real-time. TheraDoc brings relevant information into a single view, reducing the time it takes to access and utilize data, enabling better decision-making and saving clinicians' valuable time.

The Infection Control Assistant, an end-to-end solution, will help infection control practitioners (ICPs) to clinically identify, confirm and document infections. It will also reduce the time it takes to identify patient-specific needs, and create accurate internal and external reports. When workflow efficiency and information access are improved, ICPs can spend more time educating others and making patient interventions, which will help prevent and mitigate infections.

The Antibiotic Assistant helps optimize the utilization of antimicrobials by monitoring patient-specific pharmacy information in conjunction with lab and microbiology results for drug/bug mismatches, renal dosing, IV to PO switch candidates and targeted drugs. Intelligent alerts will quickly notify designated clinicians as soon as this information is available.

Using the hospital's formulary and TheraDoc generated antibiograms, the Antibiotic Assistant's unique Wizard will deliver evidence-based treatment recommendations for a wide-range of syndromes to requesting clinicians. Coupled with patient-specific information and links to evidence-based medical knowledge, these recommendations will help the Atlanta VAMC to ensure more appropriate use of antimicrobials within their facility.

TheraDoc continues to design and develop additional solutions to add to its injury and detection systems, which will aid a growing group of clinicians within hospitals to make better-informed and timelier decisions that will ultimately result in improved clinical and financial outcomes.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, November 13, 2006 – Northwestern Memorial Hospital and University of Utah Hospital are the first in the country to utilize real-time software provided by TheraDoc® Inc., a clinical informatics company, to transmit Antimicrobial Use and Resistance (AUR) reports to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These two premier hospitals are daily reporting relevant clinical data to the CDC for the ongoing "AUR eSurveillance" pilot project, which was launched to proactively address antimicrobial-resistance, a public health problem of increasing concern.

The CDC's DHQP (Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion) has leveraged their expertise with partners such as TheraDoc to develop this project, which is a research and development component of the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). The ultimate goal is to advance the nation's ability to survey antimicrobial use in hospitals and reduce the proliferation of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens. An intermediary goal is to define industry-standard message specifications that all healthcare information systems can use to report relevant data.

Gary A. Noskin, M.D., medical director, healthcare epidemiology and quality, at Northwestern Memorial, stated, "By streamlining daily reporting processes and maximizing the use of clinical data, TheraDoc exemplifies the type of help the CDC needs to create a robust system for monitoring antimicrobial use." He added, "The CDC can effectively and more-quickly combat this growing threat to public health through timelier surveillance and earlier identification of emerging resistance."

Northwestern Memorial and University of Utah implemented the TheraDoc Expert System Platform® (ESP), Infection Control Assistant® and Antibiotic Assistant® to enhance infection control and improve the quality and safety of patient care. Now, the ESP is serving as a standards-based public reporting system that daily transmits secure clinical data to a federal public health agency.

Matthew Samore, M.D., chief, division of clinical epidemiology at the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System and University of Utah, said, "TheraDoc's technology is the next generation of infection surveillance systems, and enables public reporting at minimal additional cost." He further explained, "The AUR reports represent a huge step forward, and will become increasingly powerful as more and more hospitals participate."

Messaging and vocabulary standards are essential to the successful transmission of AUR reports, as are the interoperability standards promoted by the Public Health Information Network (PHIN). In partnership with the CDC and other healthcare consultants, TheraDoc has contributed its knowledge as well as HL7 and clinical informatics experience to the development and implementation of cutting-edge standards such as those utilized in the AUR eSurveillance project.

Strictly adhering to data exchange, messaging and vocabulary standards by design, TheraDoc technology enables interoperability and connectivity within healthcare IT systems while automating the timely collection and delivery of accurate clinical data. This commitment to standards allows the technology to significantly increase any user's ability to compile and analyze clinical data - whether at the CDC, in a hospital, or at a state and federal public health agency.

Stan Pestotnik, president and CEO of TheraDoc, explained, "Applying standards to enable the transmission of data that is easily understood by IT systems and clinical personnel is truly groundbreaking." He stated further," Our software not only delivers important and timely information to public health agencies; it also standardizes data and presents it within a single view. This saves time and allows people to quickly interpret, analyze and utilize the data."

The University of Utah Hospital was the first to use standards-based TheraDoc technology to participate in the CDC's pilot program. As the beta-testing site for this project, it has successfully transmitted ADT, microbiology and pharmacy data for two years. In August 2006, Northwestern Memorial Hospital began using TheraDoc technology to transmit the same AUR data to the CDC.

As this program is more-broadly implemented, AUR reports from multiple hospitals across the country will enable nationwide surveillance of antimicrobial use and resistance and, ultimately, earlier interventions by the CDC on behalf of the American public. In particular, the national AUR eSurveillance project will enable the following:

• Detecting antimicrobial resistant pathogens
• Monitoring nationwide antibiotic usage
• Investigating the relationship between antimicrobial drug use and emerging resistance

The AUR project demonstrates TheraDoc's commitment to public reporting standards and requirements. The CDC, TheraDoc, HL7 and other partners are also applying similar technologies to address the needs of mandatory public reporting of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). To date, 14 states have mandated public reporting of HAIs, with 25 additional states considering similar legislation. An increasing number of hospitals are efficiently meeting HAI reporting requirements with TheraDoc technology, which also enables real-time infection surveillance, confirmation and intervention. Through these and other projects, TheraDoc demonstrates its leadership in developing and supporting standards-based solutions that improve the quality and safety of patient care.About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

Well-known for using advanced information technologies to transform health care, UPMC is implementing TheraDoc's Expert System Platform^® (ESP), Antibiotic Assistant®, Infection Control Assistant™ and Intervention Assistant™ to improve information available to clinicians at the point of care.

UPMC has also made a significant investment in TheraDoc and will work with the company to add new capabilities to its products. UPMC's investment is part of its broader strategy to nurture and create businesses and commercial partnerships that leverage the medical center's health care, technology and management expertise. Through its Office of Strategic Business Initiatives, UPMC's commercialization efforts will create new revenue streams that help to support its core patient care and research missions.

UPMC conducted an extensive search for technology that would enable efficient compliance with increasing federal and state infection reporting requirements. With the most comprehensive solution for automating such reporting, TheraDoc also provides tools to proactively reduce and prevent healthcare-associated infections. "TheraDoc stood out with its real-time infection data and decision-making tools that quickly show important trends and improve care for individual patients," said Tami Merryman, vice president for UPMC's Center for Quality Improvement and Innovation.

At UPMC, TheraDoc's software will automate infection surveillance and provide seamless access to historical and emerging patient information - on-site and in real-time. It will document and alert clinicians to changes in patient status and push information to the point of care, including therapeutic recommendations supported by evidence-based medical knowledge.

Stan Pestotnik, president and co-founder at TheraDoc, stated, "We are honored to support UPMC's mission to provide outstanding patient care and shape tomorrow's health system." Pestotnik noted that TheraDoc's software would help UPMC maintain its high standards of care by increasing their power to significantly improve patient safety, decrease medical errors and reduce associated costs. He further stated, "With Pennsylvania at the center of a nation responding to the problem of healthcare-associated infections, UPMC will be able to better manage and prevent infectious diseases, as well as meet mandatory state reporting requirements."

TheraDoc currently licenses its expert system technology to 114 facilities in 23 states.

About the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
UPMC is the premier health system in western Pennsylvania and one of the most renowned academic medical centers in the United States. With nearly $6 billion in assets and 40,000 employees, it covers the full spectrum of health care delivery and financing with its network of 19 tertiary, specialty and community hospitals, more than 400 outpatient sites and doctors' offices, long-term care facilities and an insurance division. On the Net: UPMC site: http://aboutupmc.upmc.com/

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, April 24, 2006 – VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System in Pennsylvania and VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System recently joined the growing list of hospitals in selecting expert clinical decision support software (CDSS) provided by TheraDoc®, Inc. (http://www.theradoc.com). The software's real-time surveillance, alerting and reporting capabilities will enhance infection control and prevention initiatives at both hospitals. It will also support patient care goals established by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, including these:

• Put quality first until first in quality
• Provide easy access to medical knowledge, expertise and care
• Enhance, preserve and restore patient function

TheraDoc will implement its Expert System Platform^® (ESP), Antibiotic Assistant^® and Infection Control Assistant^® to further enhance the already high quality of patient care provided at both Veterans Hospitals. At VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System, TheraDoc will collaborate with the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative (PRHI), a consortium that is working toward improving health care for patients and reducing healthcare costs. PRHI (http://www.prhi.org) plays a unique role in the transfer of clinical improvement knowledge in Pittsburgh hospitals.

"Investigating infections and identifying patterns is a time-consuming and lengthy process and thus, a major barrier to the adoption of efficient infection control procedures at the frontline of care," observed Peter L. Perreiah, PRHI managing director. "TheraDoc software delivers relevant information to the clinician as they make patient care decisions - including the most current infection control procedures. This helps clinicians shift from spending critical time locating data to collaborating about how to improve care." He further stated, "The software enables informed decision-making at the bedside and facilitates the efficient implementation of infection control procedures, both of which support significantly enhanced patient outcomes."

TheraDoc's expert CDSS will be integrated with the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) at the Pittsburgh and Los Angeles hospitals. The company's exclusive inference engine will automate and accelerate the surveillance of electronic medical records and the identification of infections while streamlining data collection processes for the clinicians. Concurrently, the CDSS will analyze and translate relevant patient data into meaningful, actionable information, combine it with evidence-based therapeutic recommendations and deliver these to the point-of-care - in real-time.

According to TheraDoc's co-founder and president, Stan Pestotnik, the company's software simplifies the clinician's daily workflow and provides an intuitive interface through which critical patient information can be easily accessed, evaluated and acted upon. These comprehensive capabilities will help clinicians at both Veterans Hospitals to significantly improve the quality and safety of patient care, proactively decrease the proliferation of infectious diseases and reduce healthcare costs.

Pestotnik noted, "The unique partnership between the Veterans Hospitals in Pennsylvania and Los Angeles, the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative and TheraDoc promises to yield exciting results." He further stated, "We are proud that our software will aid in significantly improving patient care for veterans on both sides of the country as well as support the elimination of medical errors and reduction of hospital-associated infections."About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, March 23, 2006 – Responding to input from infection control practitioners (ICPs) at the front line of care, TheraDoc^®, Inc. (www.theradoc.com) has upgraded its Infection Control Assistant (ICA). After using ICA version 3.2 since February, Rhode Island Hospital clinicians report that it significantly improves workflow efficiencies as well as enhances surveillance, documentation and reporting capabilities. TheraDoc's complete solution for ICPs, epidemiologists and anti-microbial stewardship teams enables them to transform the quality and safety of patient care — in real-time, through enhanced clinical decision-making.

"We estimate that version 3.2 will reduce the amount of time our ICPs spend at their desks reviewing micro and other reports by as much as 30-50-percent, allowing them more time to interact with hospital staff providing education and participating in other needed interventions," stated Julie Jefferson, RN, MPH, CIC, director of epidemiology at Rhode Island Hospital.

TheraDoc launched ICA version 3.2 at the 16th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), March 18-21, in Chicago. Attendees were among the first to see how the software helps clinicians to promptly identify, clinically confirm and report healthcare-associated as well as hospital- and community-acquired infections to meet institutional, public and regulatory reporting requirements. Now, ICPs can execute infection control, prevention and management initiatives more efficiently while simultaneously measuring clinical and financial outcomes. With ICA 3.2, epidemiologists will have normalized data coded with standardized nomenclatures to better address the challenges of clinical care and research.

TheraDoc provides innovative, best-in-class solutions to premier hospitals across the country. The company is unique in its strict adherence to medical informatics standards, which enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

ICA version 3.2 continues to utilize the company's exclusive inference engine, first released in 2000, for continuous real-time surveillance and identification of infections, regardless of their point of origin. The upgrade still features TheraDoc's sophisticated, institution-specific inferences that automatically screen possible infections based on first evidence of an infectious episode as well as filter suspected contaminants or colonizing organisms. It retains the original version's ability to facilitate rapid clinical confirmation of all possible infections identified by the software, including documentation of hospital-acquired pneumonia and surgical site infections.

Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and co-founder, said, "Version 3.2 was specifically designed to support an ICP's daily workflow by providing clinical transparency; the software supports the decision-making process, but the clinician ultimately decides on the course of action." He further stated, "Infection control practitioners know how to do their jobs. Simply put, our software places mission-critical information and knowledge at their fingertips to enable informed, proactive decision-making — in real-time."

The upgraded version features a powerful and flexible ICP Workbench, where clinical information about pre-screened potential infections is automatically compiled in a central location and placed within the daily workflow. This streamlined and intuitive feature allows clinicians to conduct all surveillance and documentation activities, including investigation of positive and negative microbiology results, notifiable diseases, and surgical procedures. Clinicians can easily evaluate and clinically confirm potential infections — within one panel. With robust benchmarking, collating, sorting and displaying capabilities, ICA version 3.2 increases efficiency, partly by allowing supporting data to be linked, i.e. lab and radiology results.

Notes Steve Parenteau, MT (ASCP), MS, CIC, infection control practitioner at Rhode Island Hospital, "The workflow is integrated. With the consolidated workspace, the ICA Workbench provides everything I need in one location, allowing more efficient use of my time performing surveillance and documentation."

ICA version 3.2 also features enhanced new functionality that provides more freedom for users to generate microbiology and infection rate reports. The content and presentation allows users to easily tailor reports to meet institutional and public requirements. Internally, reports can be created for one or more units or the entire hospital and include infection rate trends with control limits as well as NNIS and NHSN benchmarking. Externally, the upgraded software also helps ICPs to easily identify and communicate infection-related issues to local health departments or other healthcare organizations. TheraDoc¿s ICA version 3.2 is designed for what ICPs do.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

... Decision support tools help administrators and practitioners by increasing their access to information, facilitating processes, promoting consensus on language and procedures, and providing automated checks and backup.

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Hospitals are taking up new technological weapons in the fight against the silent killer that can emerge in any ward.

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SALT LAKE CITY, January 9, 2006 – The comprehensive real-time capabilities of clinical decision support software designed by TheraDoc®, Inc. were validated by a one-year study completed at Franciscan Health System (FHS), Tacoma, Wash. in 2005. The study compared pharmacy processes before and after the implementation of STELLARA, clinical intervention and patient monitoring software offered by bioMerieux, Inc. and powered by TheraDoc's Expert System Platform®.

From July 2004 to June 2005 FHS pharmacy management monitored the number of medication orders and the staff's productivity for six months prior to the implementation of STELLARA as compared to the first six months post implementation. The benchmark study revealed these compelling results:

• Six month cost savings from interventions increased by $563,412
  (23 percent increase)
• Pharmacists prevented 222 more adverse drug events (ADEs) post implementation
  (23 percent increase)
• Interventions made by pharmacists increased from 17,906 to 27,667
  (55 percent increase)

The software proved to significantly decrease adverse drug events and healthcare costs while improving pharmacist productivity. In addition, FHS pharmacists efficiently managed a 41 percent increase in medication orders without forfeiting quality or adding staff.

Study results were presented by J. Kelly Martin, PharmD and FHS director of pharmaceutical services, on Dec. 5 at the 2005 American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Midyear Clinical Meeting in Las Vegas, and published in the November issue of U.S. Pharmacist.

The FHS study demonstrates that TheraDoc and bioM'rieux have successfully partnered to help hospitals increase the quality and safety of patient care while increasing productivity and generating significant cost savings.

"We are pleased to have such impressive results emerge from FHS, a healthcare organization known for being progressive and that shares our dedication to improving patient care," stated Stan Pestotnik, president and co-founder of TheraDoc. "Through our partnership with bioMerieux, both pharmacists and the physicians they support will continue to benefit from the real-time capabilities of STELLARA, enabled by TheraDoc's comprehensive clinical decision support software."

In 2004, TheraDoc partnered with bioM'rieux, a world leader in the field of in vitro diagnostics, to configure components of TheraDoc's Expert System Platform - Antibiotic Wizard and Dose Assistant - into bioMerieux' new integrated solution, STELLARA. When implemented in a hospital, STELLARA collects microbiology results from bioMerieux' BacT/ALERT® and VITEK® systems, which identify bacteria, susceptibility and resistance patterns. STELLARA concurrently monitors other healthcare information systems such as patient registration, transfer, demographics, and pharmacy orders, to combine with microbiology results.

TheraDoc's Expert System Platform makes it possible for STELLARA to analyze patient data, translate it to actionable information and push it to clinicians at the point-of-care. When triggered by events such as inappropriate medications, potential adverse events or medical errors, STELLARA alerts clinicians and delivers microbiology results and patient information in real-time. TheraDoc's Antibiotic Wizard also allows STELLARA to support informed clinical decision-making by providing evidence-based medical knowledge and formulary preferences within patient- and disease-specific therapeutic recommendations.

Thus, STELLARA powered by TheraDoc enables more timely clinical interventions, more appropriate prescribing, a reduction of ADEs and increased clinician productivity.

About Franciscan Health System
Franciscan Health System (FHS) includes 335-bed St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, 110-bed St. Clare Hospital in Lakewood, 108-bed St. Francis Hospital in Federal Way; Franciscan Medical Group (a network of primary-care and specialty-care clinics and physicians); Franciscan Hospice House; and Franciscan Care Center.

FHS is affiliated with Catholic Health Initiatives, one of the nation's largest not-for-profit health care systems. On the Net: FHS site: www.fhshealth.org

About bioMerieux, Inc.
A global leader in disease prevention and management, bioMerieux provides assays, reagents and instrumentation for clinical microbiology, coagulation, immunoassay, and nucleic acid diagnostics; and also for product quality control in the blood bank, agri-food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries. Based in Marcy-l'Etoile, France, the company's U.S. headquarters is in Durham, North Carolina. On the Net: bioMerieux site: www.biomerieux-usa.com.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

Raise your hand if you can unravel these puzzles: Mandatory public reporting of healthcare-associated infection (HAI) rates and the electronic health record (EHR). No takers? No wonder. Both are complex issues that prove to be more of a conundrum the deeper you dig.

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SALT LAKE CITY, December 12, 2005 – TheraDoc®, Inc., a medical informatics company specializing in expert clinical decision support software, provided the technology for a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA. 2005; 294:2305-2314) on November 9, 2005. Funded by CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the randomized study targeted an increasing threat to public health - the misuse of antibiotics for viral infections, fostering the proliferation of "super bugs" or antibiotic-resistant organisms.

Researcher Matthew H. Samore, M.D., of the University of Utah and colleagues from Idaho and Utah, proved the value of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) in reducing overall antibiotic use. They also established that CDSS could improve appropriate antibiotic prescribing for acute respiratory tract infections. Conducted from January 2002 to September 2003 in 12 rural communities in Utah and Idaho, the study included 407,460 area residents and 334 primary care clinicians who documented more than 13,000 acute respiratory tract infections.

TheraDoc modified their commercially available Antibiotic Assistant with a customized algorithm designed specifically for this study. Before treating a patient with a suspected acute respiratory tract infection, clinicians in six rural communities entered patient data into a handheld personal digital assistant (PDA) running TheraDoc software. By combining the patient data with evidence-based medical knowledge relating to acute respiratory tract infections, TheraDoc's clinical decision support software generated patient-specific diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations.

With detailed information placed at their fingertips, participating physicians aided by TheraDoc's software made better-informed and more-appropriate treatment decisions, decreasing inappropriate antibiotic prescribing by thirty-two percent (32%). Clinicians in a comparative group of another six communities were supported only by a community intervention campaign that was concurrently launched to educate residents about the hazards of misusing antibiotics. The comparative group did not have access to a CDSS and realized only a five percent (5%) prescription reduction.

TheraDoc's unique Web and PDA-based clinical decision support software is purchased by hospitals across the country to aid clinician workflow and decision-making while improving the safety and quality of patient care. Researchers familiar with TheraDoc capabilities have utilized TheraDoc software in several academic studies in the past, including the following:

• In 2004, to support an assessment of local antimicrobial resistance measures (ALARM), TheraDoc provided custom configured software to ICU's in approximately 40 hospitals across the country. Coordinated by FJ Rodino Healthcare Group and funded by Irish pharmaceuticals company, Elan Corp., the project studied local patterns of antibiotic resistance to determine the best empiric therapy for patients suspected of having ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). TheraDoc software enabled data collection on Palm i705s for more than 300 patients at the bedside, which was then transmitted in real-time to the study database.
• In 2002, the multi-year IMPART (Inter-Mountain Project on Antimicrobial Resistance and Therapy) project - also funded by CDC, was designed to track the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and improve use of antibiotics in rural areas of Idaho and Utah. TheraDoc custom configured its Antibiotic Assistant for data collection and analysis.
• In 2000, to improve infection control practices and antibiotic prescribing, several rural community hospitals began participating in the Rural Antibiotic Decision-Support and Resistance Project (RADAR), funded by CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services). In this study, TheraDoc software was used after the fact to analyze prescribing patterns. This study revealed that fifty-seven percent (57.1%) of antibiotic orders in small rural hospitals included in the study group had disparities between antibiotics ordered for patients and those recommended by evidence, guidelines and expert opinion.
  "We are always pleased to partner with the CDC to support valuable academic research," stated Stanley Pestotnik, TheraDoc's co-founder and president. "This study's findings truly validate the benefits provided by our clinical decision-support software, which is designed to help hospitals and clinicians address the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant organisms."

TheraDoc is dedicated to improving the quality and safety of patient care, increasing clinician productivity, and lowering healthcare costs. The company's primary business is providing real-time clinical decision support software to hospitals across the country. More than 44 hospitals in 22 states have found significant value in TheraDoc's software, including University of Utah Health Sciences Center, Mayo Clinic/St. Luke's Hospital, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Great Plains Regional Medical Center, The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, Jewish Hospital and hospitals in the Veterans Administration (VA) Health Care System.About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

bioMérieux, Inc. recently announced the one-year anniversary for STELLARA™ Clinical Intervention and Patient Monitoring software, powered by TheraDoc® Expert System Platform®.

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Founded in 1999, TheraDoc's expert decision-support software enables timelier and more-appropriate patient treatment and significantly enhances infection control at hospitals in more than 22 states. TheraDoc's software helps reduce patient harm, lower healthcare costs and increase efficiency by collecting pertinent clinical data from disparate systems and delivering real-time actionable information to clinicians.

"We are thrilled to have achieved the level of growth that led to placing in the top-twenty companies on the Utah 100 list," stated Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc's founder, president and CEO. "This award acknowledges the efforts of our dedicated employees of whom we're extremely proud. Most important, the growth also testifies to the fact that we are providing hospitals and their physicians with the tools they need to improve the quality and safety of patient care."

TheraDoc's extensive product line includes its unique Expert Systems Platform^® technology, and suite of software solutions, including Antibiotic Assistant^™, Infection Control Assistant™, Clinical Alerts Assistant™, ADE Assistant™, and Clinical Tools.

The MountainWest Capital Network, a non-profit organization, launched the Utah 100 Program in 1994. This year's awards banquet attracted more than 1,200 attendees including some of Utah's most-successful entrepreneurs and business leaders.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

Jewish Hospital joins a growing list of hospitals in 22 states that are utilizing TheraDoc's real-time solutions to improve clinical performance, lower healthcare costs and enable timelier and more-appropriate patient treatment. TheraDoc announced its newest client at the 43rd Annual Meeting of Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) in San Francisco.

Stanley Pestotnik, TheraDoc's founder, president and CEO, said, "The award-winning Jewish Hospital is an innovative developer of cutting-edge healthcare advancements. Their decision to become the first hospital in Kentucky to install expert clinical decision-support software further demonstrates their commitment to advancing healthcare through technology and improving the quality, safety and efficiency of patient care."

Jewish Hospital's Vice President of Medical Affairs Dr. Lynn Simon notes, "We were looking for a system that could take a large amount of patient data and present it as actionable information that clinicians could use to address the immediate needs of individual patients." She states further, " After investing a year in evaluating decision-support systems, we found that TheraDoc's powerful, real-time system met our objectives to enhance infection control and achieve the quickest, most-effective treatments and interventions."

Vice President and CIO of Jewish Hospital, David C. Pecoraro, agreed. "TheraDoc's integration of the hospital's disparate information systems will allow us to move from a retrospective review to a proactive approach on infection management and antibiotic therapies. We expect the benefits to include improved treatment protocols and patient care, a reduction in admissions overall and in length-of-stay for ventilator patients in particular, all of which will lower costs."

TheraDoc is implementing its expert system platform (ESP) and suite of clinical decision-support software at Jewish Hospital, including Antibiotic Assistant™, Clinical Alerts Assistant and Infection Control Assistant™. TheraDoc's software is designed to streamline and accelerate the data collection process and enable immediate access to critical patient information. It automatically monitors, analyzes and interprets clinical data stored in ancillary information systems in a variety of departments, such as the pharmacy and radiology, in real-time. The software then transforms the data into meaningful, actionable patient information.

TheraDoc's intelligent alerting system provides timelier notification of adverse events and infectious disease occurrences. It delivers patient information, disease- and patient-specific therapeutic recommendations, and evidence-based medical knowledge to the most-appropriate clinicians, resulting in informed decision-making and timelier patient interventions.

About Jewish Hospital
Jewish Hospital is an internationally renowned high-tech tertiary referral center, developing leading-edge advancements in hand and microsurgery, heart and lung care, home care, rehab medicine (including sports medicine), orthopaedics, neuroscience, occupational health, organ transplantation, outpatient care and primary care. Jewish Hospital is the site of the world's first and the nation's second successful hand transplants in partnership with the University of Louisville and Kleinert Kutz Hand Care Center. The hospital is also the site of the world's first and second successful AbioCor¿ Implantable Replacement Hearts, has achieved Magnet nursing designation and is federally designated to perform all five solid organ transplants — heart, lung, liver, kidney and pancreas. U.S. News & World Report recently recognized Jewish Hospital as one of the "Best 50 Hospitals" in the areas of orthopaedic and heart and heart surgery care. Jewish Hospital was also named a "Top 100 Hospital" in the nation in cardiovascular excellence by Solucient, received distinction as a 2005 Most Wired Hospitals by Hospitals and Health Networks, and was presented with the Consumer Choice Award as the most preferred hospital in Louisville for the seventh consecutive year. On the Net: http://www.jewishhospital.org.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

Nearly two million people a year contract an infection during a hospital stay, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, often attributable to antimicrobial-resistant organisms. "Health-system pharmacists are instrumental in reducing that rate, through passive and active interventions," said Steve Ebert, Pharm.D., president of the 400-member Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists.

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SALT LAKE CITY, June 21, 2005 – TheraDoc^®, Inc. (www.theradoc.com), a medical informatics company specializing in expert clinical decision support, is demonstrating the comprehensive and real-time monitoring, intervention and reporting capabilities of its software, the Infection Control Assistant^®, at Booth #120 during the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology's (APIC) 2005 Conference, June 19-21 at the Baltimore Convention Center.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) has now placed increased emphasis on the prevention of hospital-associated infections versus treatment once they have occurred. TheraDoc's real-time connectivity to a hospital's health information systems and consistent, hospital-wide surveillance enables faster detection, tracking, intervention and documentation, resulting in the prevention of hospital-associated infections. TheraDoc's Infection Control Assistant provides the tools clinicians need in their frontline struggle to prevent, identify and control infections, while increasing efficiency and lowering healthcare costs.

Julie Jefferson, R.N., M.P.H., C.I.C., director of epidemiology and infection control at Rhode Island Hospital, comments, "TheraDoc's software provides somewhere between 20 to 40 hours a week for our infection control staff to be better involved in education and clinical intervention instead of gathering critical information from the hospital's different information systems," she stated. "This software is significantly increasing our efficiency by managing surveillance data and decreasing the amount of time we spend manually reviewing source documents, such as micro reports and charts."

TheraDoc's president and CEO, Stan Pestotnik, notes that healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) challenge hospitals at both the patient population and institutional level. "The harm to patients, the environment and the economy associated with these types of infections places a tremendous burden of illness on the whole healthcare system," he stated. "The resulting compromises in patient safety are staggering." The following statistic is no less shocking for its frequency in today's healthcare news: "According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 6 percent of admissions — or 2 million patients each year — will develop an infection in the hospital and 90,000 die as a result of the infection."

States across the country are moving to address this growing concern. Six now require mandatory reporting of all hospital-associated infections, including Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. In addition, legislation related to this issue is pending in 30 states, most of which are expected to pass pertinent bills in the next 12 to 18 months.

Also taking action, APIC released its position on mandatory public reporting of healthcare-associated infections on March 14, 2005. The first of its recommendations for what is needed if hospital infection data are to be publicly reported is as follows: "standardized infection surveillance measures that address both healthcare associated infections (outcomes) and healthcare practices that have been shown to reduce the risk of infection (processes).

However, the reporting of healthcare-associated infections will impact funding, reimbursement and recruiting potential for healthcare organizations large and small. Technology may provide the only means for hospitals to meet the increasing time and cost burden of complying with mandatory public reporting, APIC recommendations, as well as CDC and JCAHO guidelines.

TheraDoc's expert clinical decision support software helps hospitals, clinicians and infection control practitioners implement and execute best practice guidelines in a standardized manner, resulting in consistently better clinical and financial outcomes.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, May 17, 2005 – TheraDoc^®, Inc. (www.theradoc.com), a medical informatics company, is implementing its expert clinical decision-support software at the VA Salt Lake City Healthcare System (VA Salt Lake City HCS). TheraDoc's Infection Control Assistant (ICA) software went live on April 15, 2005. The Infection Control Assistant gives infection control practitioners the time and opportunity to quickly intervene and educate-instead of spending time gathering data they need to identify, quantify and control infectious outbreaks. TheraDoc's capabilities also provide a cost-effective way of complying with the latest infection control guidelines established by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO).

According to a 2004 report by Nicholas Graves, M.D., in the CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal, the effect of infectious diseases is one of the largest cost drivers in U.S. hospitals with annual economic costs of $6.7 billion (in 2002 dollars). Dennis S. O'Leary, M.D., JCAHO's president last year alerted hospitals to the need for change, "In the current health care environment where every expense must be defended, the large price tag of reacting to infections instead of preventing them is indefensible." (Meeting JCAHO's Infection Control Requirements, June 2004, P. 4)

TheraDoc's ICA features integrated monitoring and data collection capabilities that support infection control initiatives-in real-time. Scott Walker, vice president, strategic development at TheraDoc, explained, "Traditional manual reviews and other systems use retrospective methods, which provide only a view of the past. The ICA provides infection control practitioners with the ability to identify emerging trends, so they can intervene concurrently to avoid and mitigate infections, their effects and attendant costs." DSS, Inc., TheraDoc's integration partner for the Department of Veterans Affairs' hospitals, has 800+ implementations within the VA's hospitals and clinics nationwide. Both companies are committed to delivering technology that will enhance clinicians' abilities to consistently meet patient safety and business objectives.

Aldo Tinoco, TheraDoc's implementation project manager for the VA Salt Lake City HCS, explains the value of partnering with DSS. "Our collective clinical and technical expertise ensures interoperability between VistA and TheraDoc's software," he noted. "As users of advanced healthcare technology, the VA is embracing industry healthcare data standards and utilizing integrated systems to effectively improve patient care and quality outcome initiatives. These standards and TheraDoc's partnership with DSS have created a model for further implementations."

TheraDoc provides expert clinical decision-support technology designed to improve clinical performance, reduce patient harm, increase productivity and lower healthcare costs by enhancing clinical decision-making. VA facilities can currently license TheraDoc's Expert System Platform and the following Knowledge Modules: "

• Antibiotic Assistant™ — interprets patient records, intelligently alerts clinicians and recommends patient-specific treatment options based on current medical guidelines and evidence.
• Infection Control Assistant™ — provides information critical to enabling the identification, quantification and control of community-acquired, healthcare-associated and nosocomial infections—in real-time.
• Intervention Assistant™ — provides real-time integrated clinical management tools for pharmacists that facilitate workflow management, clinical interventions and intervention documentation. Documentation and reporting include cost, outcome, intervention acceptance, follow-up status, and productivity measurement.
• ADE Assistant™ — enables hospitals to create a comprehensive strategy to define problems and identify solutions. It detects, evaluates, characterizes, documents, reports and reduces adverse drug events through continual surveillance.
• Clinical Alerts Assistant™ — delivers updated, relevant patient data-as "actionable" information supported by evidence-based knowledge—via intelligent alerts and reminders.

About Document Storage Systems
Document Storage Systems, Inc., (DSS, inc.) has been developing exclusively for the VHA for over 12 years and has in excess of 800 VHA VistA/CPRS integrated installations. Our core competency is software integration for the Veterans Administration's VistA/CPRS System. DSS, inc. specializes in developing VistA/CPRS integrated VHA Electronic Medical Record and Administrative programs, as well as co-developing VistA/CPRS interfaces with Commercial Software (COTS) Vendors/Partners. Services include Software Consultation, Development, Project Management, Integration, Sales & Marketing, Installation, Training, and Technical Support geared to VistA.
About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

TheraDoc's Infection Control Assistant (ICA) software went live on April 15, 2005. The Infection Control Assistant gives infection control practitioners the time and opportunity to quickly intervene and educate--instead of spending time gathering data they need to identify, quantify and control infectious outbreaks.

Read the entire article ...

"The field of infectious diseases is complex; software such as TheraDoc's can expedite the daily work of the infection control team so that they can have a bigger impact on saving patients' lives," said Leonard A. Mermel, D.O., Sc.M., A.M. (Hon), Rhode Island Hospital's medical director, department of infection control. "When clinicians harness the software's power to collect patient data, they will dramatically reduce the grind of data collection and make better use of their time."

Julie Jefferson, R.N., M.P.H., C.I.C., Rhode Island Hospital's director of epidemiology and infection control, stated further, " Infection control professionals (ICPs) easily spend between two-to-four hours daily manually gathering the data they need. TheraDoc's automated processes allow ICPs more opportunity to serve, teach and heal."

According to Dr. Mermel, who was recently named president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology (SHEA), hospitals and ICPs daily contend with gathering vital and diverse patient information from a hospital's myriad departments in time to prevent infections in a vulnerable patient population. TheraDoc's expert clinical decision-support software offers the possibility of addressing such issues by bringing infection rates and their relative antibiotic resistance levels to the attention of a hospital's clinicians and infection control team-in real-time and at the point-of-care.

Stanley Pestotnik, TheraDoc's founder, president and CEO, said, "Our software will increase productivity as well as significantly reduce patient harm and associated costs by delivering the information clinicians need to better manage infectious disease occurrences, intervene quicker and prescribe more appropriately. We look forward to supporting Rhode Island Hospital's objective of advancing medicine and changing lives."

TheraDoc is installing its expert system platform (ESP) and several products from its suite of clinical decision-support software at Rhode Island Hospital, including Antibiotic Assistant, Infection Control Assistant and Clinical Alerts Assistant. Through integration with the hospital's disparate information systems, TheraDoc's software will automate surveillance and streamline data collection as well as analyze, interpret and transform clinical data into meaningful, actionable information. The company's intelligent alerting system provides timelier notification of infectious disease occurrences and delivers critical patient information along with therapeutic recommendations supported by evidence-based medical knowledge-within the clinician's daily workflow.

About Rhode Island Hospital
Founded in 1863, Rhode Island Hospital is a private, not-for-profit hospital and is the largest teaching hospital of Brown Medical School. A major trauma center for southeastern New England, the hospital is dedicated to being on the cutting edge of medicine and research. Rhode Island Hospital ranks 13th among the independent hospitals that receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, with research awards of more than $27 million annually. Many of its physicians are recognized as leaders in their respective fields of oncology, cardiology, orthopedics and minimally invasive surgery. The hospital's pediatric wing, Hasbro Children's Hospital, has pioneered numerous procedures and is at the forefront of fetal surgery, orthopedics and pediatric neurosurgery.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, January 18, 2005 – TheraDoc^®, Inc., will implement its entire suite of expert clinical decision-support software at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMC), the company announced today. TheraDoc will provide real-time connectivity to UMC's health information systems, delivering intelligent clinical alerts, individualized therapeutic recommendations, and system-wide surveillance. Once successfully installed at UMC, TheraDoc's monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities will be utilized to create a groundbreaking, statewide public health surveillance system.

The Mississippi Department of Health has a collaborative partnership with the UMC to enhance healthcare throughout Mississippi, through which nearly one million dollars was awarded to the medical center in October 2003. The partnership enabled the purchase of TheraDoc's software, which will significantly improve UMC's infection control capabilities and decrease the time it takes to identify and respond to infectious disease outbreaks within the hospital and the surrounding communities. In addition, the resulting statewide public health surveillance system will enable real-time infectious disease reporting to the Mississippi Department of Health.

"This relationship represents the nexus of the vision of an academic medical center, a state department of health, and a medical informatics company for using clinical decision support technology to improve the safety and quality of care delivered to individual patients and the citizens of a state," noted Stanley Pestotnik, TheraDoc's president and CEO.

TheraDoc's comprehensive infection control capabilities are key to achieving the partnership's goal of providing the tools hospitals need to effectively conduct epidemiology within the realities of today's infection control challenges. The technology will provide the means to address antimicrobial resistance as well as help clinicians manage infectious diseases more efficiently and expertly. The software is also expected to help UMC contain costs, by enabling decreased pharmacy spending overall through reduced non-formulary drug orders, adverse drug events, and inappropriate antibiotic prescribing.

Pestotnik stated further, "The Mississippi Department of Health and the UMC have created a partnership that is a trend-setting example for the future of healthcare; TheraDoc is honored to participate and contribute to its success."

TheraDoc's suite of expert clinical decision-support software includes the Antibiotic, Infection Control, ADE, Clinical Alerts and Rounds Assistants. Consisting of an expert system platform (ESP) and evidence-based knowledge modules, TheraDoc's software collects discreet patient data from disparate hospital information systems-in real-time. It analyzes and interprets data and seamlessly applies medical knowledge, thereby transforming data into meaningful, actionable information. The ESP and knowledge modules work collaboratively to deliver computer-generated alerts, patient information and therapeutic recommendations to clinicians-within their daily workflow and at the point-of-care. With a wealth of information at their fingertips, clinicians can make better-informed decisions that will measurably improve clinical and financial outcomes.

About the Mississippi Department of Health
The Mississippi Department of Health's mission is to promote and protect the health of all Mississippians. The state's public health agency has 109 county health department clinics throughout the state that offer public health services such as women's health, immunizations, infectious disease outbreaks, food safety and emergency response and preparedness. The Mississippi Department of Health can be found online at www.HealthyMS.com or by calling toll-free 24 hours/7 days a week at 1-866-HLTHY-4U.

About the University of Mississippi Medical Center
The University of Mississippi Medical Center addresses healthcare needs of the state in two ways: by providing the training of health professionals who will care for Mississippians and by direct care in the University Hospitals and Clinics. As the teaching hospitals for all Medical Center education programs and a 772-bed diagnostic and treatment referral center, the University Hospitals and Clinics serve the entire state of Mississippi. Annually, inpatients total about 27,000 with more than 418,000 outpatient and emergency room visits each year. On the Net: UMC's site http://www.umc.edu/.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and ontinuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, CO, November 8, 2004 – Micromedex, a part of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE:TOC; TSC: TOC), the leader in information solutions for scientific and healthcare professionals, and TheraDoc, Inc., a medical informatics company specializing in expert clinical decision-support solutions, today announced a partnership. The agreement makes Micromedex clinical knowledge resources available to clinicians within TheraDoc applications

Clinicians will now get real-time access to Micromedex drug and disease information within TheraDoc's decision-support solutions. The partnership enables clinicians to develop better therapeutic treatment recommendations in the context of their patient's condition. For example, clinicians are connected within their workflow to summarized drug information as well as instant access to detailed, evidence-based clinical knowledge.

"The inclusion of objective, comprehensive clinical knowledge resources from Micromedex further enhances our ability to provide clinicians the resources they need to make better-informed, more appropriate therapeutic treatment decisions," said TheraDoc president and CEO, Stanley Pestotnik. "Through integration with a hospital's health information and ancillary computer systems, TheraDoc technology provides the connectivity between the growing volume of data that hospitals are collecting electronically on their patients and the Micromedex wealth of evidence-based medical knowledge."

Jay Katzen, vice president of marketing and product development at Thomson Micromedex, said, "We're pleased to be partnering with TheraDoc to augment their recommendations with actionable clinical intelligence, resulting in the highest standard of care. Together, we give clinicians a single point of access to reliable decision-support tools and help them to improve patient outcomes."

TheraDoc technology provides a unique knowledge solution with the 'Power to Reason.' The partnership between Micromedex and TheraDoc supports clinical decision-making by combining relevant patient information with standards-based clinical data, current medical knowledge, and epidemiological factors. The technology not only interprets records and alerts the appropriate clinician to patient and clinical situations requiring action, but also recommends patient-specific treatment options. The recommendations are based on current medical guidelines and evidence, at the time of care. With a wealth of information at their fingertips, clinicians make better-informed decisions that enhance the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care.

The Thomson Corporation and Micromedex
The Thomson Corporation (www.thomson.com), with 2003 revenues from continuing operations of $7.44 billion, is a global leader in providing integrated information solutions to more than 20 million users in the fields of health care and scientific research, law, tax, accounting, financial services, higher education, reference information, corporate training and assessment. Its healthcare solutions include MICROMEDEX (www.micromedex.com), trusted medical information and flexible technology enabling clinicians to access answers, alerts, and recommendations that will enhance decisions, prevent adverse events, and promote best clinical practices throughout the continuum of care. With operational headquarters in Stamford, Conn., Thomson has approximately 38,000 employees and provides services in approximately 130 countries. The Corporation's common shares are listed on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC).

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, June 22, 2004 – TheraDoc^®, Inc., a Utah-based medical informatics company specializing in clinical decision-support technologies, has signed an industry exclusive agreement with bioMerieux, Inc., an international leader in the field of in vitro infectious disease diagnostics based in Marcy-l'Etoile, France.

Through this agreement, customized TheraDoc decision-support technology will power bioMerieux's new clinical intervention software, STELLARA™.

"Be the First to Know" is more than just a slogan at bioMerieux; it's the guiding philosophy behind the company's continued dedication to the fight against disease and the search for appropriate treatments. STELLARA is designed to deliver actionable patient information to clinicians at the point-of-care, augmenting the microbiology results from bioMereiux's leading BacT/ALERT^® and VITEK^® systems and providing real-time antibiotic monitoring and management.

STELLARA, embedded with TheraDoc's technology, will provide clinicians with in-depth information about an organism and its level of resistance, resulting in more appropriately prescribed antibiotics, better decision-making, improved patient safety and quality of care, while reducing medical costs.

"STELLARA provides a solution to the field of biological diagnostics, an industry that has not previously benefited to a large degree from the comprehensive benefits of today's information technologies," noted TheraDoc's president and CEO, Stanley Pestotnik. "We are optimistic about our partnership with bioMerieux and believe that ultimately, clinicians and their patients will be the greatest beneficiaries of our agreement."

bioMerieux provides automated biological diagnostic systems to hospitals throughout the world, including more than 2,000 hospitals in the United States. The groundbreaking partnership provides the device manufacturer's customers an integrated solution with advanced clinical intelligence — a trend with great potential. bioMerieux creates significant differentiation for its devices with the offering of STELLARA's enhanced software technology and TheraDoc creates a new market stratum as both pursue their goal of safer, higher quality patient care.

STELLARA augments clinical decision-making by providing health care professionals with knowledge-enriched, disease-specific recommendations for antimicrobial management based on individual patient profiles and parameters, in addition to presenting microbiology results. The software is configurable, scalable to the institution's needs, and mobile (PDA).

Powered by TheraDoc, STELLARA integrates individual electronic patient records with coded clinical data and focused medical informatics to provide clinicians with tools that enhance their ability to deliver high-quality evidence-based care. STELLARA uses proprietary inference engines developed by TheraDoc and multiple data sources from an institution's existing information systems. The software provides easy electronic access to the recommendation logic and web-locatable reference articles(s) or proof sources. STELLARA is designed to effectively present important clinical results, allowing the clinician to make more timely and appropriate therapeutic treatment decisions.

The combination of bioMerieux's extensive expertise in infectious disease diagnosis, along with their North American sales network and TheraDoc's extensive experience in clinical medical-informatics systems promises to provide STELLARA users with the best of this exciting new technology.

About bioMerieux
As an international leader in the field of in vitro infectious disease diagnostics, bioMerieux designs, develops, manufactures and markets reagents and automated instruments for medical analyses and for cosmetics, and product quality control in the agri-food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries.

bioMerieux, based at Marcy-l'Etoile, France, employs 5,450 people throughout the world and counts 14 production sites distributed in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, Brazil, Japan and Australia, as well as a European logistics center in France.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, May 27, 2004 – In a groundbreaking move to accelerate and improve the quality and delivery of notifiable disease reports to a public health department, TheraDoc, Inc.^®, the Nebraska Health and Human Services System (NHHS), and Great Plains Regional Medical Center (GPRMC) in North Platte, Nebraska have collaborated to utilize the extensive real-time surveillance capabilities of TheraDoc's expert system technology. Through this collaboration, GPRMC is helping Nebraska document occurrences of notifiable diseases by electronically transmitting pertinent laboratory data to the Department of Health and Human Services via TheraDoc's Public Health Network Assistant (PHNA) solution as they occur.

Jonathan B. Olson, B.S., TheraDoc's chief technology officer, stated, TheraDoc's standards-based expert system infrastructure fostered the rapid deployment of a real-time system where notifiable disease alerts can now be sent from GPRMC directly to the Nebraska State Health Department. The automated notification process is a breakthrough for public health surveillance and happens as a byproduct of the natural workflow of GPRMC's clinical professionals.

In January 2003, GPRMC contracted with TheraDoc, a medical informatics company, to implement its expert clinical decision-support system to enhance the hospital's infection control, quality of care and patient safety initiatives. Linked with GPRMC's multiple information systems, TheraDoc's knowledge-based technology continually surveys patient population data to detect instances of naturally occurring infectious diseases, chemical exposures, and the targeted introduction of biological agents.

Nebraska's Quest to Monitor Infectious Diseases
Proven successful within the first three months of implementation at GPRMC, TheraDoc's real-time public health surveillance capabilities came to the attention of Nebraska state epidemiologist, Tom Safranek, M.D., who was investigating how the NHHS could receive electronically-transmitted notifiable disease reports from individual hospitals across the state. Since that time, TheraDoc has worked closely with Dr. Safranek and his team to enable the automated, electronic transmission of GPRMC's laboratory data to the Nebraska Health and Human Services system.

Automated Reporting System Meets National Public Health IT Standards
Nebraska is a leading state in deploying the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) Base System, and in implementing an electronic lab reporting (ELR) system that is capable of receiving data from local and national laboratories. These systems demand strict compliance with national public health data and information system standards as stipulated in NEDSS, PHIN and the PHIN Messaging System (PHIN MS).

TheraDoc went to great lengths to ensure that the PHNA complies with regulatory standards, including those outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's integrated surveillance technology and real-time messaging infrastructure provides a solution that enables laboratories to comply with these stringent standards while providing an advanced analysis and notification system to healthcare organizations across the country. Today, the PHNA¿s automatic transmission of laboratory information for notifiable diseases from GPRMC to the NHHS testifies to the overall success of the collaborative effort.

Olson noted, "There is immense value in the timely identification of public health events. Receiving lab data electronically—and in real-time—allows state health departments to respond more quickly to infectious disease outbreaks." He stated further, "We believe that TheraDoc's system could serve as a national model of an automated surveillance, messaging and ELR system that expedites the transmission of critical data from healthcare institutions to public health agencies.

The PHNA's targeted functionality provides an opportunity for other states, regions and federal groups to follow Nebraska¿s lead in real-time public health surveillance and early intervention. Hospitals can now quickly identify notifiable diseases and fulfill their reporting requirements to state or local health departments at the same time.

About Public Health Network Assistant
To enable early intervention and documentation of infections and other notifiable diseases, TheraDoc's PHNA translates raw lab data and presents it to clinicians and public health officials in standardized medical nomenclature. The infrastructure utilizes a standard HL7 message format to enable real-time transmission of notifiable disease occurrences. Critical patient data is automatically delivered to infectious disease professionals as context-specific, actionable information. In addition, this unique solution monitors several targeted hospital-acquired pathogens to aid clinicians in initiating early treatment and preventing the spread of drug resistant pathogens. As a result, the PHNA can significantly contribute to the management and reduction of hospital-acquired infection rates.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

"Sophisticated software programs and information technology are revolutionizing the practice of medicine," said Thomas Tinstman, M.D., associate director, clinical information systems at UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center. "Electronically maintaining all patient records and clinical data in a single, secure system provides an important base upon which advanced data analysis, decision-support, surveillance and alerting systems can operate, giving practitioners powerful new tools to help improve the quality of care and patient safety." Tinstman further noted that the ability to automatically monitor clinical data on individual patients, as well as specific populations within the hospital or clinic has the potential to significantly reduce adverse drug events and enhance infection control.

TheraDoc, a medical informatics company specializing in decision-support, will integrate its expert systems with UC Davis' information and ancillary systems to leverage the critical patient information contained within them. TheraDoc's expert systems for clinical decision support are comprised of integrated, evidence-based knowledge modules that will work together to monitor conditions of UC Davis' overall patient population as well as individual patients.

"We are pleased to support UC Davis Health System's advanced model of care with our technology," said TheraDoc's president and CEO, Stanley Pestotnik. "I believe that our expert systems' ability to push actionable patient information to the clinician will enhance their capacity to provide better outcomes for their patients, clinicians and organizational goals."

TheraDoc's integrated modules feature a unique ability to survey patient information across the electronic medical record for relevant data and events. The technology analyzes and interprets raw patient data, translates it to actionable clinical Information and delivers it to clinicians within their daily workflow, through intelligent alerts linked to supporting evidence-based knowledge.

TheraDoc will implement the following knowledge solutions to serve a wide-variety of healthcare providers within the UC Davis Health System:

• Antibiotic Assistant© — supports and augments clinical decision-making by interpreting patient records, intelligently alerting clinicians and recommending treatment options that are patient-specific and based on current medical guidelines and evidence.
• Infection Control Assistant© — provides information critical to enabling the identification, quantification and control of community-acquired, healthcare -associated and nosocomial infections — in real-time.
• Public Health Assistant© — is one of the most advanced analysis and notification systems available today. This module enables the quick identification and control of epidemics caused by naturally occurring diseases and agents of bioterrorism.
• Adverse Drug Event Assistant© — features continual electronic surveillance that goes beyond collection data for review and reporting. Its features a comprehensive ability to detect, evaluate, characterize, document, report and reduce adverse drug events.
• Clinical Alerts Assistant© — leverages TheraDoc's integrated, automatic surveillance capabilities to deliver updated, relevant patient data -- as "actionable" information supported by evidence-based knowledge — via intelligent alerts and reminders.

Current implementations at prominent medical institutions across the country have shown that better-informed clinical decisions through the use of TheraDoc's integrated expert systems result in significantly improved patient safety and quality of care as well as reduced costs to the hospitals and their patients.

About UC Davis Health System
UC Davis Health System is a fully integrated academic health system encompassing the UC Davis School of Medicine and its acute-care hospital and affiliated outpatient centers, including a network of physician practices in 15 northern California communities. UC Davis is a leader in the use of information technology to improve the practice of medicine.About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, February 23, 2004 – TheraDoc Inc.^® is introducing its newest decision-support software, the Clinical Alerts Assistant© knowledge module, at Booth #1712 during the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition/2004. The software furthers TheraDoc's dedication to helping clinicians improve patient safety and the quality of care by increasing awareness of real and potential issues while supporting the decision-making process.

The Clinical Alerts Assistant leverages TheraDoc's proven ability to integrate with multiple hospital information and ancillary systems and continually monitor the electronic medical record (EMR). TheraDoc's automated surveillance results in updated, relevant patient data, which the Clinical Alerts Assistant delivers to healthcare providers as "actionable" information supported by evidence-based knowledge in the form of intelligent alerts and reminders.

The consistent application of expert medical knowledge and institutional trends to existing — and emerging — patient information enhances a clinician's ability to properly treat patients and proactively address problems. The integrated software further saves time and supports the clinical decision-making process by enabling the efficient gathering of data for analysis, allowing clinicians to redirect their valuable time to other high-priority activities.

"With the Clinical Alerts Assistant, TheraDoc delivers a greater breadth of actionable clinical knowledge to caregivers facilitating the clinical decision-making process and enabling them to significantly change the healthcare experience and outcome for each patient," stated Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and CEO.

TheraDoc's Web-based technology and knowledge solutions are vendor-neutral to enable integration with a variety of hospital information and ancillary systems. Leveraging the information contained within ADT (Admission/discharge/transfer), laboratory and pharmacy systems, the Clinical Alerts Assistant intelligently alerts clinicians to early warning signs of relevant changes in a patient's condition, enabling earlier intervention and providing the information caregivers need to respond.

Clinicians can easily configure the Clinical Alerts Assistant to meet their individual needs and preferences through a personalized subscription process. They can select the alerts and reminders pertinent to their medical discipline, the point in the care process they want to receive them, the manner in which they are received (real-time or on-demand), and the device on which they receive them. The following are examples of additional options for configuration:

• Delivering critical alerts only after someone else has documented them.
• Alerting if two hours have passed and no clinical intervention has been documented.
• Retracting alerts if another clinician has responded.
• Suppressing alerts that would be inconsequential, based on a patient's known condition (for example, a diabetic's condition may trigger on critical Creatinine clearance levels).

Clinical Alerts Assistant, like TheraDoc's other knowledge solutions, is designed to reduce the annoyance caused by the "noise" and nuisance alerts often associated with many alerting systems on the market today. The Clinical Alerts Assistant features TheraDoc's innovative ability to appropriately adjust its alerting based on the clinician's "need to know," level of experience and specialty, as well as hospital guidelines.

Mobile by definition, clinicians are constantly providing patient care, consulting colleagues, teaching students and researching. The pace of medical practice is accelerating, calling for solutions that can be delivered on a multitude of mobile platforms. TheraDoc knowledge solutions can deliver real-time alerts to secure wireless handheld devices or tablet PCs. Access to patient information is also provided via a secure VPN connection from remote Internet locations, enabling clinicians to respond to critical clinical situations from virtually anywhere.

TheraDoc's integrated expert systems are providing significantly improved patient safety and quality of care as well as reduced costs at prominent medical institutions across the country. Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital recently added the Clinical Alerts Assistant to its suite of TheraDoc decision-support knowledge modules.About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

TheraDoc, Inc(R) launches a comprehensive adverse drug event surveillance software, the ADE Assistant, designed to perform automated trigger-based surveillance and enhanced voluntary reporting of adverse drug events in hospitalized patients.

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SALT LAKE CITY, December 7, 2003 – TheraDoc Inc^®, will introduce the ADE Assistant, at the 38th ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting in New Orleans, December 7-11. A medical informatics company specializing in therapeutic decision-support, TheraDoc designed the ADE Assistant to provide large and small hospitals with a comprehensive solution for automatic and continual adverse drug event surveillance, documentation, reporting and archiving.

TheraDoc's ADE Assistant is the next installment in the company's efforts to help clinicians improve the quality of patient care through real-time technology that delivers patient information and evidence-based knowledge to support the decision-making process. Clinicians at some of the nation's most prestigious medical institutions are currently using TheraDoc's Antibiotic, Infection Control, Public Health Surveillance and Clinical Alerts Assistants to manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases.

TheraDoc's ADE Assistant features extensive capabilities that allow hospitals to effectively address ADE concerns. Following are highlighted benefits:

• Enables compliance with JCAHO standard, PI 4.3, through its continual, hospital-wide, Web-based surveillance that provides real-time identification of adverse drug events.
• Allows timely voluntary reporting of observed events by clinicians via an intuitive and configurable user interface, accessed through handheld or Internet-connected devices.

TheraDoc's clinical pharmacists, Michael Barton and Cindy Neilson, will demonstrate the ADE Assistant's sophisticated and flexible features at Booth #2516, including detection, causality assessment, analysis, documentation, and reporting. Meeting attendees can see first-hand how the ADE Assistant increases the efficiency of their daily workflow, resulting in reduced patient harm as well as improved medication safety and patient care.About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

"We're excited that TheraDoc was selected to support patient safety and infection control initiatives at Northwestern and Hopkins. Northwestern's decision to implement our comprehensive decision-support modules testifies to its "Patients First" philosophy and overall commitment to integrity, excellence and teamwork," stated Stan Pestotnik, co-founder and CEO of TheraDoc. "Likewise, TheraDoc's technology will enable physicians at Hopkins to further the institution's mission to provide the highest-quality care and service for all people in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of human illness."

TheraDoc will completely integrate the Antibiotic and Infection Control Assistants and Public Health Surveillance with each hospital's information and ancillary systems. Once integrated, the sophisticated software will continually monitor, track and evaluate relevant patient data stored within the hospitals' disparate information systems. With its unique ability to reason across the electronic medical record, TheraDoc's knowledge-based technology automatically analyzes and interprets patient-specific data and then intelligently alerts physicians to events that might require clinical intervention.

Concurrently, TheraDoc's decision-support software delivers real-time, actionable patient information and evidence-based reference materials related to the event-merged within the physician's daily workflow in an easy-to-use format. The automated delivery of comprehensive context-specific information eliminates significant time-consuming activities, allowing clinicians to initiate more timely interventions and make better-informed point-of-care decisions. To further reduce time demands, the Antibiotic and Infection Control Assistants enable compliance with institutional and state reporting requirements.

The Infection Control Assistant is fully integrated with TheraDoc's Antibiotic Assistant and Public Health Surveillance to address the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance and allow hospitals to effectively detect diseases caused by naturally occurring or a targeted introduction of biological and chemical agents. The Infection Control Assistant continually monitors for indicators of infectious diseases and tracks the emergence of antimicrobial-resistant organisms within the hospital and from the surrounding community enabling clinicians to more quickly identify, quantify and control infectious diseases.

"TheraDoc's technology not only provides a huge benefit for clinicians at Northwestern and Hopkins today, it also builds an equally important infrastructure for tomorrow," stated Pestotnik.

TheraDoc has begun implementing its software at Northwestern and Hopkins and expects live dates in first quarter 2004.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital
Northwestern Memorial Hospital (NMH) is one of the country's premier academic medical centers and is the primary teaching hospital of Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Northwestern Memorial and its Prentice Women's Hospital have 720 beds and more than 1,200 affiliated physicians and 5,000 employees. Providing care in a state-of-the-art facility, the hospital is recognized for its outstanding clinical and surgical advancements in such areas as cardiothoracic and vascular care, gastroenterology, neurology and neurosurgery, oncology, organ and bone marrow transplantation, and women's health.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital was ranked as the nation's 5th best hospital by the 2002 Consumer Checkbook survey of the nation's physicians and is listed in the majority of specialties in this year's U.S. News & World Report's issue of "America's Best Hospitals." NMH is also cited as one of the "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers" by Working Mother magazine and has been chosen by Chicagoans year after year as their "most preferred hospital" in National Research Corporation's annual survey.

On the Net: Northwestern Memorial Hospital's site: www.nmh.org.

Johns Hopkins Medicine
Johns Hopkins is one of the world's premier centers for scholarship, research and patient care. The university and The Johns Hopkins Health System are separate, but closely allied, institutions. Founded in Baltimore, they now reach across the Baltimore-Washington area, with additional facilities in China, Italy and Singapore and partnerships around the world. The university comprises eight schools, a research and development division called the Applied Physics Laboratory and a number of institutes and centers.

The Health System, which has its origins in the founding of the world-famous Johns Hopkins Hospital, now comprises three hospitals, as well as other elements of an integrated system, from a community physicians group to home care. Johns Hopkins Medicine, established in 1995 to unite Hopkins' biomedical research, clinical, teaching and business enterprises, brings together The Johns Hopkins University of School of Medicine and its faculty with the facilities and programs of The Johns Hopkins Health System. The $2.7 billion enterprise is one of the largest employers in Maryland. Its components consistently are named at the top of national rankings for best hospital and best school of medicine, and its faculty consistently win the largest share of NIH research funds. Results of this research continue to advance efforts to diagnose, treat and prevent many diseases.

On the Net: Johns Hopkins Hospital's site: www.jhmi.edu.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, September 15, 2003 – A customized data collection software program integrated into PDAs and designed by TheraDoc Inc., a medical informatics company, has proven to significantly accelerate the clinical research processes in an ongoing observational cohort study called ALARM (Assessment of Local Antimicrobial Resistance Measures), coordinated by FJ Rodino Healthcare Group. TheraDoc's unique solution allows physicians to easily collect critical study data at the patient¿s bedside and immediately submit the information to a secure, centralized database via wireless PDA technology.

ALARM's objective is to assess local patterns of antimicrobial resistance and determine the most appropriate initial empiric therapy for patients suspected of having ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). According to Frank J. Rodino, MHS, PA, founder and President of the FJ Rodino Healthcare Group, the ALARM study enables an analysis of how doctors are using the information they have available to prescribe antibiotics for VAP and how accurate and effective those decisions are. The study is supported by an educational grant from Elan Pharmaceuticals and involves more than 60 physicians in demographically diverse hospitals across the country.

Rodino further stated, "The steering committee and I selected TheraDoc based on the company's excellent reputation and extensive experience in developing software technologies, such as their Antibiotic Assistant, which enables physicians to address anti-microbial resistance and improve infection control in hospitals."

Stanley Pestotnik, TheraDoc's co-founder and CEO, said, 'It has been a privilege to provide a customized PDA data collection program for the ALARM study. The technology we've designed for this study is perfectly aligned with our expertise in developing software that reduces medical errors and mortality rates, improves infection control and lowers treatment costs, all in real-time.'

Rolf Wagenaar, product manager at Elan Pharmaceuticals, added, "TheraDoc's innovative programming is a powerful tool that takes data collection to another level, significantly accelerating the clinical investigation process. TheraDoc's user-friendly interface not only saves time, it also facilitates physician participation." The majority of clinical research studies rely on paper-based data collection processes and Wagenaar notes that the use of TheraDoc's technology for electronic data collection is "groundbreaking."

Dr. Marin H. Kollef, participating physician and steering committee member, agreed. "This study provides a new strategy for conducting clinical research. Handheld devices are a very efficient way to collect data and time efficiency is the way of the future." Kollef noted, "The information collected is very important to linking therapy to outcomes. Study results should shed light on optimizing antibiotic treatment for serious infections and make an important contribution to improving mortality and morbidity rates in hospitals across the country." Dr. Kollef is an Associate Professor of Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine; Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, St. Louis Missouri.

TheraDoc Technology Accelerates Electronic Data Collection
The steering committee designed the ALARM study to analyze outcomes of approximately 1,000 patients diagnosed with VAP. The study incorporates 3 of the 12 steps identified in the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) guidelines for preventing hospital-acquired pneumonia.

TheraDoc's customized solution determines patient inclusion or exclusion according to study protocols. Once a patient is added to the study, physicians then use the customized PDAs to collect data at the point of care—the bedside. Demographics, patient history, the results of physical exams and diagnostic testing, and illness severity measurements such as CPIS and APACHE II scores are entered into the program. If a patient has not responded to the first round of therapeutic treatment, which may demonstrate antibiotic resistance, this is also recorded along with corrective actions. After entering case information, physicians can quickly forward it to the study's central database. Once submitted, data is compiled for analysis and is ultimately utilized to evaluate the efficacy of each institution's current empiric treatment of suspected VAP cases.

Steering committee member, Dr. Michael S. Niederman, Chairman, Department of Medicine at Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, New York, said, "TheraDoc worked with us to develop an uncomplicated, useful and portable data collection tool that gets the job done. The software program adapted well to the PDAs." Niederman added, "The ALARM study is an excellent paradigm for facilitating clinical research, anywhere in the hospital."

Rodino, Wagenaar and the steering committee expect that study results will help critical care clinicians gain a better understanding of how to minimize antimicrobial resistance and improve care for patients with VAP.

Wagenaar reports that the study will continue indefinitely after an initial six-months of data collection. At the end of the initial phase, each hospital can generate an institution-specific antibiogram specific to VAP. It is anticipated that the growing database will provide for additional evaluations, which may further strengthen institutional infection control and other patient safety initiatives. Wagenaar also noted that the steering committee plans to publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

TheraDoc Inc.(R), a medical informatics company specializing in therapeutic decision-support, has launched its Web-based Infection Control Assistant.

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SALT LAKE CITY, September 9, 2003 – TheraDoc Inc^®, a medical informatics company specializing in therapeutic decision-support, has launched its Web-based Infection Control Assistant. The integrated software automates hospital-wide surveillance for infection-related events and "pushes" critical, real-time patient data to infection control professionals (ICPs). Through TheraDoc's technology, ICPs no longer need to painstakingly compile and enter data by hand, dramatically improving infection control and patient safety while reducing costs—all critical quality-of-care initiatives pursued by leading healthcare institutions today.

The Infection Control Assistant (ICA) works in conjunction with TheraDoc's premier product, the Antibiotic Assistant. These modules integrate with a hospital's information and ancillary systems to survey patient population data stored in multiple electronic sources including medical records, ADT, pharmacy, laboratory and radiology. The Infection Control Assistant is uniquely capable of reasoning across these databases, automatically identifying and examining relevant patient data to signal ICPs about the development of unique community- or hospital-acquired infections.

Predetermined changes in a patient's status trigger the software's intelligent alerting capabilities, which immediately notify ICPs of a potential problem through an electronic device of their choice—PDA, pager, fax or email. Simultaneously, the Infection Control Assistant presents ICPs with all data relevant to the event via internet-connected devices, including tablets, laptops and PCs. Hyperlinks allow immediate access to patient records and the documentation that led TheraDoc's inference engines to suspect an infectious event, including lab results and radiological studies. In addition, the Infection Control Assistant provides a comprehensive initial analysis of the outbreak, which ICPs can then utilize to establish baseline infection rates and identify patterns of infections occurring within the institution or the surrounding community.

"This clinical decision-support module ensures that the critical information needed to identify, quantify and control infections is automatically presented as actionable information within the daily workflow," stated Stanley Pestotnik, TheraDoc's co-founder and CEO. "We have worked closely with ICPs to understand their specific needs and have designed a system that allows them to quickly analyze and respond to potentially life-threatening infections as early as possible."

TheraDoc's Cindy Nielson, Pharm.D. and ICA project manager, notes, "ICPs no longer have to search through several disparate systems, losing valuable time locating, retrieving and organizing information. Additionally, after reviewing the comprehensive information placed at their fingertips, they can initiate control measures to contain the infection and prevent its spread without leaving the Infection Control Assistant."

Great Plains Regional Medical Center, a not-for-profit, 116-bed community hospital in North Platte, Nebraska, recently installed the Antibiotic Assistant and Infection Control Assistant. Infection control nurse, Teresa Nowak reports, "TheraDoc's real-time reporting has allowed me to significantly control and reduce infections. In the past, I have had to manually analyze information a month-or-two behind." Nowak fully expects that the comprehensive capabilities of the Infection Control Assistant will enable her to better initiate the management of'and thus further reduce—outbreaks of nosocomial infections at GPRMC.

Module Provides Targeted Surveillance
As it continuously monitors patient populations and procedures that experience increased incidences of infection, the customizable software allows ICPs to conduct targeted surveillance of specific microbes, infection sites, special populations (transplant patients), special procedure patients (dialysis), and specific devices (ventilator-associated pneumonia). It also tracks cultures by patient, hospital department or specimen type.

While the Infection Control Assistant provides improved infection control capabilities throughout a hospital, the intensive care unit (ICU) will most-dramatically benefit. Nowak notes, "The Infection Control Assistant allows me to identify current surgical site infection rates on a monthly basis, for all surgeons and all procedures. Previously, this process was performed on a yearly basis for each surgeon and only on one designated procedure."

Online Antibiogram Enables In-Depth Analysis of In-House Organisms
Another prominent feature of the Infection Control Assistant is its ability to create an institution-based antibiogram for both community- and hospital-acquired organisms. Clinicians can access the Web-based antibiograms in real-time to select an organism and conduct an analysis of antibiotics tested and levels of susceptibility. The antibiogram is automatically updated monthly to enable the reduction of institution-specific resistant strains of organisms.

Software Enables Compliance with Mandatory Reporting Requirements
A hospital-acquired infection, which JCAHO has established as a sentinel event, requires specific reporting and investigative activities to determine the cause of the event and to prevent similar events in the future. TheraDoc's software generates site-specific clinical and administrative reports that help meet institutional and state requirements for reporting nosocomial infections. In addition, the Infection Control Assistant continually monitors for notifiable diseases, automatically alerts ICPs when it locates evidence and generates a variety of reports that meet state health department requirements.

The Infection Control Assistant's comprehensive capabilities substantially support the ICPs' decision-making process by providing essential information needed to significantly accelerate clinical intervention;thus, improving patient care and reducing mortality rates and health costs. Early adopters of TheraDoc's new Infection Control Assistant include Mayo Foundation in Jacksonville, Florida, PeaceHealth and Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

SALT LAKE CITY, August 18, 2003 – TheraDoc, Inc.^®, a medical informatics company specializing in therapeutic decision-support, has implemented its Antibiotic Assistant^®, ADE (Adverse Drug Event) Assistant© and Infection Control Assistant© modules at Great Plains Regional Medical Center (GPRMC). Designed to improve patient safety and quality of care, these integrated modules will enable GPRMC clinicians to reduce adverse events, enhance infection control and utilize the hospital's computerized physician order entry (CPOE) process to its greatest benefit.

"Patient safety is a top priority at GPRMC, a not-for-profit, 116-bed community hospital in North Platte, Nebraska, that provides a full-range of services for approximately 150,000 patients a year. TheraDoc's modules will enable us to institute better best-practice protocols and make more informed treatment decisions," stated Janet Bernard, M.D., a physician on the pilot implementation team.

According to Stanley Pestotnik, TheraDoc's co-founder and president, "Smaller hospitals such as GPRMC have the same concerns about patient safety and infectious diseases as large healthcare organizations. Our decision-support modules enable physicians in any size hospital to significantly reduce patient harm and initiate more effective infection management measures." Pestotnik notes that the ability to identify and respond to community- and hospital-acquired infections much earlier will enable hospitals to improve outcomes and shorten length of hospitalization, ultimately resulting in reduced medical costs for patients.

At GPRMC, TheraDoc's Antibiotic Assistant module is fully integrated with QuadraMed's Affinity^® CPOE system to provide clinicians with vital decision-support information and therapeutic treatment recommendations, then seamlessly connect them to Affinity's order entry system. GPRMC found TheraDoc while looking for a technology with monitoring and infection control capabilities to integrate with the recently installed CPOE system.

TheraDoc worked with a six-member pilot team at GPRMC to integrate its decision-support modules with the hospital's legacy, ancillary and CPOE systems. A complete integration facilitates the technology's capability to automatically combine hospital, patient and coded clinical data with epidemiological factors, global medical knowledge, institutional protocols and formulary preferences. The system's sophisticated knowledge-based engines continuously monitor, analyze and interpret all relevant data, providing the power to reason across electronic records and make clinical inferences that are built on evidence-based medical knowledge.

TheraDoc's Antibiotic Assistant Module Interprets, Alerts and Recommends
The Antibiotic Assistant gathers and surveys data that is routinely entered and stored in disparate systems during the course of a patient's stay, including the electronic medical record (EMR), pharmacy, laboratory, radiology, and ADT. When the Antibiotic Assistant detects a change in a patient's status that could require a clinical intervention, it sends an automatic, intelligent alert to the clinician via an electronic device such as a PC, PDA, pager, or cell phone.

This module delivers a wealth of information to support therapeutic intervention, including disease- and patient-specific recommendations for therapeutic treatments, tests and specialty referrals. It also provides immediate access to the clinical sources and medical reference materials that support these recommendations. The program employs a standardized clinical vocabulary to translate raw data to easy-to-access, usable information and automatically considers and eliminates patient treatment options that are contra indicated due to mitigating factors and patient attributes.

"We are particularly impressed with the fact that our physicians can review critical patient information and evidence-based reference materials, in real-time and within their daily workflow," said Kimberle M. Dyer, COO at GPRMC. "TheraDoc's timely alerts and recommendations will facilitate a more immediate assessment of the status of each patient as well as quicker interventions by our clinicians, infection control, pharmacy and related personnel."

Additional Modules Reduce Adverse Drug Events and Improve Infection Control
TheraDoc's Adverse Drug Event Assistant module constantly monitors drug orders, laboratory results, physiological data, enhanced clinician reporting, and combinations of these data for signals indicating an adverse event or potential adverse event. A sudden stop of an existing drug order, a decrease in dosage or the ordering of a known antidote would be signals monitored by TheraDoc as possible triggers for an adverse drug event (ADE) alert. Laboratory results and/or clinical manifestations such as high drug levels, liver enzymes, diarrhea, tremors, and low platelet counts either alone or in conjunction with drug orders are also used to infer a possible ADE.

National healthcare statistics have shown that 20-30 percent of ADEs are antibiotic-related. The ADE Assistant enhances a hospital's ability to counteract this problem by detecting, characterizing and reporting adverse drug events faster.

Another critical component of patient safety initiatives'and the largest cost-driver in hospitals today'is the control and management of infections. TheraDoc's Infection Control Assistant module gives infection control professionals the information they need to identify, quantify, and control community-acquired, healthcare-associated, and hospital-acquired infections. It has the power to automatically capture events of interest, infer infection related events from clinical data, alert infection control professionals, and generate clinical and administrative reports.

"GPRMC is as concerned about infectious outbreaks, antibiotic resistance and nosocomial infections as any large healthcare organization," noted Bernard. "With the implementation of this module, infection control professionals at GPRMC can effectively identify, quantify and control infectious diseases, including those that might indicate a bio-terrorism threat."

Teresa Nowak, GPRMC's infection control nurse, is excited about the Infection Control Assistant's real-time capabilities, which will enable the staff to identify and take action against nosocomial infections. "TheraDoc continually updates its antibiograms, which is a great improvement on our current procedure," Nowak said. "This module will help our busy physicians keep up with the development of 'drug/bug' pairs, which will minimize antibiotic resistance issues at this hospital."

TheraDoc's expert systems provide the level of capabilities that clinicians need to reduce errors, and improve patient safety and quality of care. These modules complement and completely meld with CPOE systems, serving as a bridge technology that facilitates acceptance of computerized order entry initiatives. The software's user-interface is customizable and intuitive, providing individual users with a great deal of flexibility, which promotes ease of adoption.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

As president and CEO of a rising new medical informatics company, Stan Pestotnik's duties are many and varied. In addition to his usual executive tasks, he is chief fundraiser and contributes to the company's sales and product design.

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SALT LAKE CITY, November 12, 2002 – TheraDoc, Inc.™, a medical informatics company that designs expert systems to augment clinical decision making, has signed an agreement with Mayo Foundation to install TheraDoc's Antibiotic Assistant™ software module at St. Luke's Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. The module provides health care professionals with knowledge-enriched, disease-specific recommendations for antibiotic treatments, tests, and referrals based on individual patient profiles. Mayo Foundation has contracted with TheraDoc for a pilot implementation that will enable the hospital to conduct a complete, on-site assessment of the benefits provided by this comprehensive decision-support system.

TheraDoc's expert systems address important patient safety initiatives identified by the LeapFrog Group. The LeapFrog Group report recognizes the need for computer-assisted clinical decision making and physician order entry (CPOE) to help physicians and clinicians reduce medical errors, enhance patient safety and control costs. The Antibiotic Assistant successfully addresses these initiatives through its integration of standardized clinical vocabularies, global medical knowledge, information from a hospital¿s ancillary systems including electronic patient records, institutional protocols and epidemiological factors.

"Integrating this information and providing it in a useable context will proactively support clinicians in making informed treatment decisions and ultimately improving the quality of patient care," said TheraDoc co-founder and president, Stanley Pestotnik.

Addressing Patient Safety Initiatives
The Antibiotic Assistant module is designed to address the increasing national concern for the quality and safety of patient care and the number of serious medication-related problems or deaths in hospitals across the United States. The software system incorporates powerful knowledge-based engines to consider all options for managing an infectious disease. When formulating its therapeutic recommendations, the software systematically eliminates those options that are contra-indicated due to patient attributes and other mitigating factors such as allergies.

In addition, the Antibiotic Assistant enhances the safety of hospital patients and the community-at-large with two companion applications that enable hospital-based practitioners to quickly identify, quantify and control hospital and community-acquired infectious diseases.

The first, the Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology application, automatically screens patient data for the occurrence of nosocomial infections. When evidence of a notifiable disease is located, it alerts primary caregivers and infection control personnel via email, fax, alphanumeric pagers, or Web interface. Practitioners can effectively verify that a patient has contracted an infectious disease while at the hospital, act on the Antibiotic Assistant's recommendation for treatment, and access guides for controlling the spread of the disease.

The second application, the signal-based Public Health Surveillance Assistant, is one of the most advanced analysis and notification systems available today. It provides real-time early recognition of the unusual patterns or increased numbers of unusual disease diagnoses associated with either naturally occurring epidemics or agents of bioterrorism — without the built-in delay associated with traditional reporting systems. When a pattern is detected during the continual monitoring and analyzing of patient data, hospital clinicians are automatically alerted that an outbreak of infectious disease may be developing in the surrounding community.

Both applications allow clinicians to trace specific infectious diseases by selecting any organism of interest and a timeframe for analysis. In addition, the software tracks and charts "drug-bug" pairs for the emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. When a resistant organism is identified the hospital's infection control department, pharmacy and other institution-specific departments are immediately notified to stop prescribing the ineffective antibiotic.

Implementing the Power to Reason Across Populations
TheraDoc's groundbreaking technology is the first to provide the power to reason and to make inferences across electronic patient records and existing information systems allowing the Antibiotic Assistant to interpret data, alert appropriate clinicians, and recommend evidencebased options for therapeutic tests and/or treatments. A study conducted by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1999 found that errors in therapeutic treatment contributed to 98,000 annual deaths in hospitals across America and added an estimated $2 billion to the country's health care costs. Four times as many Americans die each year from medication-related problems than die annually from automobile accidents.

TheraDoc's pilot program with St. Luke's is among an increasing number of agreements executed by the company in 2002. Others include projects funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS); an installation at University of Utah Hospital and Clinics, and an agreement with Merck Pharmaceutical Co. to provide physicians with a hand-held, stand-alone version of the Antibiotic Assistant. The company has also signed a re-marketing agreement with health-information systems vendor, QuadraMed, and is engaged in discussions with multiple software vendors and healthcare organizations.

The Evolution of TheraDoc and the Antibiotic Assistant
TheraDoc's Antibiotic Assistant software evolved from pioneering research conducted in the late 1980s by Pestotnik, M.S., R.Ph. and John P. Burke, M.D. In 1998 their research culminated in a fully functional integrated antibiotic management tool that not only provided physicians with clinical decision support, but also set the international standards for computeraided infection control, computer monitored adverse drug events and integrated anti-microbial decision support.

This pioneering work resulted in more than 75 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts, speaking engagements and coverage in many national daily and scientific publications. An enthusiastic demand grew among health care professionals for a similar product that could be integrated with hospital IT systems throughout the United States.

TheraDoc Today
In 1999, Dr. Merle A. Sande, chairman of the University of Utah Department of Internal Medicine, and Mark Skolnick, Ph.D., a pioneer of the Human Genome Project and one of the founders of Myriad Genetics, joined Pestotnik and Burke to create TheraDoc, Inc. to commercialize the technology. This team of preeminent doctors, joined by experts in medical informatics and software engineering, continues to work together to design programs suitable for integration into a variety of legacy systems in hospitals and healthcare institutions nationwide. TheraDoc plans to address additional healthcare needs with its forthcoming modules, including pain management, diabetes and depression.

About TheraDoc
TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.