MALVERN, Pa., February 27, 2007 -- Siemens Medical Solutions (www.usa.siemens.com/medical) today introduces a landmark healthcare data-mining tool, Soarian® Quality Measures powered by Siemens’ award winning REMIND™ technology, and added MedCentral (North Central Ohio), and Reading Hospital (Reading, Pa.) as beta sites for this tool. Additionally, St. Luke’s Health System (Boise, Idaho) has added Soarian Quality Measures to its complement of Siemens solutions. These providers are among a growing number of medical facilities who will be utilizing advanced decision support technology to create efficiencies and orchestrate clinical best practices.

Soarian Quality Measures Powered by REMIND (Reliable Extraction and Meaningful Inference from Non-structured Data) can help healthcare providers realize quality improvements by replacing time-consuming manual chart reviews with highly accurate and automated chart abstraction of quality measures. Soarian Quality Measures combines all available patient data, including free text in clinicians’ notes, to capture a provider’s compliance with accepted practices to help improve quality of care. The solution also supports improvements in quality assurance, guideline adherence, certification and pay-for-performance, and currently supports quality measures as defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organization’s (JCAHO) and others.

“Soarian Quality Measures Powered by REMIND represents a fundamentally new approach to reporting quality measures. By automatically extracting performance measures from patient information that is already captured electronically, we expect to reduce the time spent in manual extraction of information and focus the time gained on improving quality of care,” said Jay Raman, chief information officer, Reading Hospital. “By improving the accuracy and timely access to quality data, we anticipate it will make a significant difference to our patients and to our healthcare professionals who deliver patient care.”

As a landmark data analysis and decision support solution, Soarian Quality Measures dramatically improves medical record evaluation to help enhance patient care, and support quality of care initiatives and reporting.

“The innovation of this system lies in its ability to combine and analyze a patient’s record, including free text, giving physicians and nurses unprecedented intelligence to determine the appropriate method of care,” said Ajit Singh, Ph.D., president and CEO of Siemens Medical Solutions Image and Knowledge Management division. “With the rise in pay-for-performance and quality initiatives, healthcare organizations need easy, robust reporting processes. Soarian Quality Measures Powered by REMIND allows institutions to focus on the quality of patient care, and not on how to collect the data.”

Soarian Quality Measures overcomes critical challenges in defining best practices and quality reporting by analyzing all available data in the patient record, including free text. Without requiring any manual entry or change in workflow, the system uses the patented, award winning REMIND technology which collects patient data from disparate data sources, including billing, labs, and physician dictations. These data points are then analyzed using advanced machine-learning technologies to extract quality of care measures. In recent studies, Soarian Quality Measures has shown a 96 percent concordance with trained, manual chart abstractors to extract JCAHO and CMS quality measures.

“Quality measure reporting through Soarian Quality Measures is Siemens first step of many in applying the revolutionary REMIND technology. We anticipate developing a number of applications to support improvement of healthcare processes, including billing, patient identification for clinical trials, and clinical decision support,” Singh added.

About Siemens Medical Solutions

Siemens Medical Solutions of Siemens AG (NYSE:SI) is one of the world’s largest suppliers to the healthcare industry. 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. Recent acquisitions in the area of in-vitro diagnostics – such as Diagnostic Products Corporation and Bayer Diagnostics – mark a significant milestone for Siemens as it becomes the first full service diagnostics company. Employing more than 41,000 people worldwide and operating in over 130 countries, Siemens Medical Solutions reported sales of 8.23 billion EUR, orders of 9.33 billion EUR and group profit of 1.06 billion EUR for fiscal 2006 (Sept. 30). Further information can be found by visiting www.siemens.com/medical.

Contacts 
Siemens Medical Solutions
Kristen Saponaro, 610-448-4729
kristen.saponaro@siemens.com