Amdahl and @Outcome Announce Health Care Industry Strategic Alliance

Business Wire, Oct 23, 2000

Business Editors

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 23, 2000

Strategic Global Alliance Will Impact the Marketplace by

Increasing Revenues of Pharmaceutical and Medical Industry

Manufacturers and Improving Efficiencies in the Healthcare

Provider System

Amdahl Corporation and @Outcome, Inc. today announced a new strategic alliance aimed at the health care industry to increase the productivity and effectiveness of orthopedic, cardiology, oncology and other specialty care physicians at the point of care.

The alliance will continue to extend/target @Outcome's growing direct customer base of top tier medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers who utilize and re-distribute @Outcome's enabling technologies to their physician customers. Increased productivity and clinical data repositories enable @Outcome's customers to realize opportunities in inventory distribution, research and product development via the collection of clinical and outcomes data. Physician users realize significant workflow efficiencies, increased revenues, reduced practice overhead, through deployment of @Outcome's software.

"As a company, Sulzer Orthopedics looked at the needs of orthopedists and made some strategic decisions. We wanted to make a profound difference to how orthopedic services are delivered and managed. For example, huge inefficiencies continue to exist in many orthopedic practices This is not surprising, given the rapid pace of change and regional variations of our healthcare system," said Gary E. Sabins, president, Sulzer Orthopedics, a global orthopedic medical device company and an @Outcome customer. "By providing physician groups with @Outcome's solutions and Amdahl's services, Sulzer is helping to address the challenges in how an orthopedic group practice manages such issues as patient flow, the patient to physician interface, hospital rapport with physicians, outcome analysis, patient satisfaction and payor relations."

The alliance relies on @Outcome's unique and highly secure Web-based product set, the Care Process Portal(TM) (CPP), and point of care applications that connect physicians and their clinic staff with their patients, medical technology suppliers, payors, employers, and other local market trading partners. As information is gathered through clinical workflow and documentation application technology (the heart of the @Outcome application suite), the CPP also generates a comprehensive database that spans from patient referral to outcome, enabling physicians and their trading partners to measure, manage, and analyze overall outcomes data. This data gathering is automated and designed to follow a physician's daily workflow, as well as manage collaboration with suppliers, hospitals, and medical device or pharmaceutical companies over @Outcome's Web-based portals. The utilization of CPP workflow design can dramatically improve the efficiency, quality and profitability of physician practices.

While @Outcome continues to focus on the development of best practice methodologies and health care industry subject matter expertise, Amdahl Corporation will focus on operational and network infrastructure needs, business continuance, and service level assurance for the same solutions. Amdahl has solutions presence inside the data, web, and network operations centers of more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies.

Amdahl's ongoing contribution will also include: technology architecture, data center and storage management, network operations, service level agreements, high-availability and asset inventory management requirements. Amdahl will also help assure the remote deployment, support, and maintenance of @Outcome's technology requirements for each @Outcome customer and patient care provider via its network of consultants, and customer support personnel placed throughout North America. The alliance can also extend globally, via Amdahl's international reach.

"Selecting Amdahl as our primary and strategic partner for global technology infrastructure deployment, support, and mobilization was essentially a very easy choice, and our selection has been very warmly embraced by our customers. Amdahl enables us to continue our primary solution development focus and assures our growth as a leading provider of point-of-care, web-enabled healthcare technology solutions," said Ralph Keiser, CEO of @Outcome.

Keiser added, "Amdahl diminishes our risk from operations, assures our solution availability and service levels, while allowing us to be very flexible, yet disciplined with our business growth models. We can now attract and retain the largest pharmaceutical and medical supply manufacturers in the industry as strategic customers, particularly those with large North American and multi-national global distribution and value added service support requirements."

"Amdahl's strategy is to leverage our unique, and nearly 30 year legacy of providing best of breed, highest available solutions to Global 1000 customers. Our infrastructure support offerings enable us to uniquely address risk mitigation and speed to market businesses. We become the glue for their operational plans, and the infrastructure expertise and bandwidth to support these high-energy, near term return expected businesses. With @Outcome, we also plan to leverage Amdahl's global deployment, service, and support organizations to help assure @Outcome service level strategies too." said Brendan Dawson, President, Amdahl Services Division.