Johns Hopkins and American Healthways Announce Publication of ``Standard Outcomes Metrics and Evaluation Methodology for Disease Management Programs''

Business Wire, Feb 18, 2003

Business Editors

NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 18, 2003

Physician Consensus Document Provides Industry's First Tool for

Comparing Results Across Disease Management Programs

The Johns Hopkins Outcomes Verification Program and American Healthways, Inc. (Nasdaq/NM:AMHC), today announced the publication and availability of the "Standard Outcomes Metrics and Evaluation Methodology for Disease Management Programs". The Consensus Report was approved at a recent conference of nearly 150 physicians and other health care professionals, representing primary and specialty care, the health plan and hospital industries and academic medicine. The work produced by the conference attendees is the first comprehensive set of standards for evaluating the performance of individual disease management programs, as well as for comparison of outcomes from programs with different design and delivery mechanisms.

"We believe this work should serve to significantly advance the credibility of disease management program outcomes," said Frederick Brancati, M.D., Johns Hopkins University associate professor of medicine and epidemiology and director of the Outcomes Verification Program. "Our health care system continues to face the pressures of double-digit cost inflation. Because more and more disease management programs are being developed to try to address this problem while improving quality of care, it is vital to payers, both private and governmental, to be able to apply well grounded, standardized metrics and methodologies to validate outcomes results across different disease management settings.

"At Hopkins, we see increasing evidence that if the focus of the health care community is on outcomes of care, rather than on units of service or utilization, patients will likely receive better care and, as a result, we expect that health care costs can be reduced as well," added Brancati. "Standardized metric sets and a uniform methodology should allow disease management organizations and evaluators to better substantiate this evidence."

"The Standard Outcome Metrics and Evaluation Methodology for Disease Management Programs" addresses who should define outcomes, what those outcomes should be and how they should be measured. Updates to the document to reflect changes in standards of care, additions of new disease states and enhancements in methodology are anticipated on an annual basis.

"While the underlying principles of disease management are sound and millions of Americans participate in these programs, skepticism remains about program performance," said Dr. Victor Villagra, immediate past president of the Disease Management Association of America. "This document will become an invaluable reference for private and public payers, consultants and disease management organizations seeking both methodological rigor and real-world practicality."

Ben R. Leedle, Jr., president and COO of American Healthways, agreed, noting that the disease management industry has been challenged to demonstrate program effectiveness by many stakeholders. "While each individual disease management organization had its own approach to calculating and evaluating outcomes, the absence of a uniform set of metrics and a standard methodology led many to be skeptical about actual program performance. I expect the content of this consensus document to rapidly become the benchmark for all program evaluations, and that will be of significant value to the entire industry."

The Johns Hopkins Outcomes Verification Program brings together clinicians and research faculty from the Johns Hopkins schools of Medicine, Nursing and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. For more than a century, Johns Hopkins' defining health care mission has been the quest for new knowledge, leading to better health for individuals and societies. Among the world's most well known and highly regarded health care institutions, its faculty annually receives more federal funding for biomedical research than at any other U. S. university. And both the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health have for the past 12 years received top ranking by surveys conducted by U.S. News & World Report.

American Healthways is the nation's leading and largest provider of specialized, comprehensive care enhancement services to hospitals, physicians and health plans. Recipient of the 2002 Comprehensive Disease Management Company Leadership Award for the second consecutive year, American Healthways is the only company in its industry whose programs are designed to meaningfully address the needs of 100% of its customer populations. The clinical excellence of the Company's programs have been reviewed and approved by Johns Hopkins, and their quality has been recognized by the National Committee on Quality Assurance, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, and the American Accreditation Healthcare Commission, the first and only care enhancement provider in the nation to be accredited or certified by all three organizations. American Healthways contracts to provide disease and care management programs to health plans with members in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The Company also operates diabetes management programs in nearly 80 hospitals nationwide.