Siemens and RxHub Announce Strategic Alliance to Support Medication Reconciliation across the Continuum of Care; Siemens Continues to Strengthen Patient Safety Strategy With Industry-Leading Content Partners

Business Wire, Oct 24, 2005

MALVERN, Pa. & ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Siemens Medical Solutions, a world leader in medical equipment and information technology (IT) solutions, and RxHub(R), the leader in connecting the prescribing industry for the exchange of patient-specific prescribing information, have announced a strategic alliance to provide clinicians with convenient access to detailed, up-to-date outpatient medication history that can be reviewed and incorporated into a patient's medication reconciliation within the acute care setting. The relationship strengthens Siemens' ability to offer innovative tools designed to deliver complete patient information to help its customers achieve world-class results in patient safety, operational efficiency and clinical outcomes.

The alliance leverages Siemens' expertise in enterprise clinical IT systems and advanced patient safety solutions and RxHub's industry leadership in providing healthcare practitioners with timely and up-to-date medication history and claims information.

The agreement is the first of its kind for RxHub's Medication and Eligibility Delivery Solution (MEDS) service, pairing the company with a proven, established healthcare technology leader.

Under the terms of the agreement, Siemens will offer its large base of hospital and health system customers access to RxHub's MEDS. The MEDS service, which currently provides access to the drug benefit eligibility status of more than 150 million covered lives, is unprecedented in the healthcare industry. In line with JCAHO patient safety initiatives, Siemens will provide its acute care customers with a leading-edge solution for querying the databases of contracted Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBMs) and payers to find out what medications a patient has been/and is currently taking, greatly improving reliability in medication reconciliation.

"The RxHub relationship complements Siemens' patient safety strategy by streamlining the acquisition and delivery of patient-specific information to help achieve safer outcomes," said Tom Miller, president, healthcare IT division, Siemens Medical Solutions. "As we continue to deploy innovative patient safety solutions and add leading clinical content partners to our portfolio, this alliance enables Siemens to immediately deliver critical patient-specific medication history information to clinicians at the appropriate point of care."

"One of the major causes of medication errors in the hospital setting is due to the lack of complete patient information at the point of care," said David McLean, CEO of RxHub. "We are excited about aligning with a world leader like Siemens to solve this problem, while significantly accelerating our expansion into new markets."

According to industry statistics, medication errors and adverse drug events have become among the country's most serious healthcare problems, accounting for 770,000 injuries or deaths each year in hospitals and costing up to $5.6 million per year, per hospital, depending on size.

Through its robust portfolio of clinical IT solutions, Siemens helps providers achieve patient safety outcomes, including reduced medication errors, improved cycle times, reduced variance, increased compliance with best practices and enhanced workflow. Siemens range of solutions allows healthcare providers to measure and adjust processes to create a culture of safety that impacts every aspect of the organization. Adding access to outpatient medication history information will further improve the reliability and ease in reconciling inpatient and outpatient medications, thus contributing to the reduction of medication errors and adverse drug events.

RxHub is leading the industry with its focus on patient safety by providing formulary and medication history information at the point of prescribing. Last quarter RxHub received over 500,000 requests for medication histories. The current gains in RxHub's transactions and partnerships demonstrate that e-prescribing will play a key role in the national health IT agenda and the goal of all Americans having an electronic health record (EHR) within the next 10 years.

RxHub electronically routes up-to-date patient-specific medication history and pharmacy benefit information to caregivers at every point of care. Our end-to-end solution enables physicians to prescribe the most clinically appropriate and cost effective prescription to be sent electronically to the patient's pharmacy of choice. RxHub's mission is to partner with all stakeholders in the prescribing industry to improve patient safety, increase workflow efficiency and reduce the overall cost of health care delivery. RxHub was founded in 2001 by the then three largest PBMs--Advance PCS (acquired by Caremark Rx), Express Scripts and Medco Health Solutions. RxHub is headquartered in St. Paul, MN. For more information, please visit www.RxHub.net

Siemens Medical Solutions of Siemens AG (NYSE:SI) with headquarters in Malvern, Pennsylvania and Erlangen, Germany, is one of the largest suppliers to the healthcare industry in the world. The company is known for bringing together innovative medical technologies, healthcare information systems, management consulting, and support services, to help customers achieve tangible, sustainable, clinical and financial outcomes. Employing approximately 31,000 people worldwide and operating in more than 120 countries, Siemens Medical Solutions reported sales of 7.07 billion EUR, orders of 8.12 billion EUR and group profit of 1.05 billion EUR for fiscal 2004. More information can be obtained by visiting http://www.usa.siemens.com/medical-pressroom.>

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