MedicAlert to Play Key Role in OMG/HL7 Electronic Health Record Standards Collaboration

TURLOCK, California (September 23, 2004)

MedicAlert® Foundation International announced today that the Foundation will play a key role in the collaboration efforts between the HL7 and OMG Standards Development Organizations. MedicAlert’s actions support a strategic agreement, announced September 17, 2004 between the two organizations, to develop software standards to enhance the use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in healthcare. OMG and HL7 will work together on electronic healthcare standards, including electronic drug prescribing, and patient record interoperability infrastructure.

EHRs allow patient data to be captured and shared among properly authorized healthcare users. The standards apply to all areas of healthcare, including hospitals, doctor’s offices, benefits payers and clinics. Systems that conform to the EHR standards will allow increased access and communication between doctors and patients, improving patient safety, quality of care and reducing costs. Today, the MedicAlert EHR stores information pertaining to each member’s medical conditions including medication, dosages, medical conditions, allergies, implanted devices, health insurance, advanced directives, organ donation, physicians, pharmacists and family contacts. This information is often needed before emergency treatment can begin. MedicAlert is also able to perform extensive medication screens.

"The OMG-HL7 collaboration encourages the development of a standard for the EHR that improves patient safety and helps to save lives," said David Harrington, CTO at MedicAlert and chair of OMG's Healthcare Domain Task Force. "This is a big step forward, because it combines the stature and visibility of HL7 and their RIM (Reference Information Model), which has been accepted by the healthcare industry and governments worldwide as the standard for the 21st century, with the OMG's agile, vendor focused technology adoption process. This collaboration will encourage the industry to move forward quickly and with one voice in the development and implementation of standards-based systems to improve quality of care and patient safety. MedicAlert embraces these and other HL7 standards in our worldwide database."

"MedicAlert is committed to providing technology-based solutions to achieve the goal of becoming a single trusted source for medical history and information," said Paul Kortschak, president and CEO of MedicAlert. "The OMG and HL7 standards will improve our core services and expand the reach of our lifesaving mission."

"This agreement is a landmark in healthcare standards, and we are pleased that MedicAlert has agreed to lead this collaboration effort," said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group. MedicAlert’s 50 years of acting as a trusted third party working in the interests of their members, along with their established electronic health information system are critical components necessary for the development of standard service specifications. This strategic relationship will ensure the rapid development and deployment of standards to improve the quality of care, lower healthcare costs while increasing patient safety.

"HL7 is pleased to collaborate with OMG in the creation of such standards, and also to further leverage OMG’s Unified Modeling Language^TM, (UML®) in HL7’s methodology and tools," said HL7 Board Chair Mark Shafarman. "HL7 has used, and will continue to use UML as a key foundation element of our methodology for creating standard information models, bound to standard vocabularies, in support of semantic interoperability of healthcare and healthcare related information across the industry’s many information domains and applications. HL7 acknowledges the role of the MedicAlert Foundation in facilitating the organizational agreement between HL7 and OMG, and looks forward to MedicAlert's continued participation in these efforts."

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About MedicAlert® Foundation International

MedicAlert (www.medicatlert.org) is one of the world’s largest nonprofit membership organizations with a mission to protect and save lives. MedicAlert provides Electronic Health Records, identification and medical information to authorized doctors, nurses and other medical professionals on behalf of our members so that they receive faster, safer healthcare, and avoid harmful or fatal reactions.

About the OMG

With well-established standards covering software from design and development, through deployment and maintenance, and extending to evolution to future platforms, the Object Management Group (OMG) (www.omg.org) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration which maximizes ROI, the key to successful IT. OMG's standards cover multiple operating systems, programming languages, middleware and networking infrastructures, and software development environments. OMG's Modeling standards, the basis for the MDA, include the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM). CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's standard open platform with hundreds of millions of deployments running today. Headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, with offices in Washington, DC, Japan and Germany, the Object Management Group is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry specifications consortium.

About HL7

Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven, Inc. (www.HL7.org) is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. HL7’s more than 2,000 members represent more than 500 corporate members, including 90 percent of the largest information systems vendors serving healthcare.