Cognos Prescribes Business Intelligence Solution For Markham Stouffville Hospital

BURLINGTON, Mass, Sept. 17, 2002 -- Markham Stouffville Hospital, a community hospital in the Town of Markham, Ontario, Canada has implemented a business intelligence (BI) solution from Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN) the world leader in BI solutions. The Cognos solution is driving time and cost savings throughout the organization and empowering Hospital staff to use data effectively to improve patient care and service.

Deploying Cognos BI solutions enables Markham Stouffville Hospital to easily access, report on and analyze the volumes of patient, administrative, clinical and financial data that is stored in Hospital information systems. For example, the Pharmacy can use Cognos to analyze trends in prescription data. Cognos provides the ability to quickly sort volumes of prescription data into views of information by physician, drug category, clinical service and location within the Hospital. This information can then be used to negotiate better contracts with suppliers or treatment regimes with physicians.

"The healthcare industry tends to be data rich, but information poor," said Scott Briggs, director of information technology, Markham Stouffville Hospital. "Cognos and Newcomp provided us with a secure business intelligence solution that allows us to derive value from our existing technology investments and use our collected data to reduce manual processes, improve data analysis, and ultimately improve patient care services. We are very pleased with the results we have seen to date."

"The challenge at Markham Stouffville Hospital was to transform a complex financial and statistical database into concise, actionable knowledge," says Michael Roberts, a partner and project manager with Newcomp Solutions. "Cognos and MS-SQL were the enabling technologies and the Hospital's knowledge workers now benefit from having timely access their critical decision support information."

The Cognos BI solution is deployed on top of the Hospital's data repository, part of the MEDITECH system, a healthcare-specific ERP solution that integrates data from all aspects of patient care including registration, pharmacy, lab results, diagnostic imaging, financial information and clinical documentation. With Cognos, Hospital staff can gain a detailed understanding of operations and use that data to establish performance metrics, improve patient care delivery, and ensure Hospital funds are being utilized to maximum effect.

"The healthcare industry continues to face new and increasing regulatory and financial pressures," said Dave Laverty, senior vice president, global marketing, Cognos. "Cognos provides these organizations with a fully integrated BI solution that enables hospitals to optimize resource use, and improve efficiencies, while protecting the confidentiality and security of patient data."

About Markham Stouffville Hospital:

Markham Stouffville Hospital is a 215-bed acute care community hospital located north of Toronto in York Region serving a rapidly growing, diverse community. MSH has been providing high quality, patient-focused care since 1990. "Our mission as your community hospital is to make every experience with us great."

About Newcomp Solutions:

Established in 1986, Newcomp Solutions is a full service solution provider specializing in designing and implementing Business Intelligence Reporting and Data Warehouse systems. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and with field offices in London, Ottawa and Montreal, Newcomp Solutions serves a broad cross-section of clients throughout Canada and the United States in a variety of industries including; Manufacturing, Banking, Government, Distribution, Pharmaceuticals, Telecommunications and Retail. Newcomp is proud to be the recipient of the Cognos Pinnacle Partner award for the fourth consecutive year and is an active participant in the Cognos Preferred Consulting Partner Program.

About Cognos:

Cognos delivers software that helps companies improve business performance by enabling effective decision-making at all levels of the organization. A forerunner in defining the BI software category, Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage -- Corporate Performance Management (CPM) -- achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale.

CPM lets organizations measure execution against business strategy to ensure the two are aligned at all levels across the enterprise. Cognos provides a framework for CPM that links people, information, and decision- making processes throughout the organization, and enables the complete management cycle with integrated software for planning, budgeting, reporting, analysis, and scorecarding.

Cognos serves more than 20,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos enterprise business intelligence solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.

     Media Contacts:
     Brooke Somers
     Cognos, 613-738-1440
     Samantha Smith
     The Horn Group, 781-356-7139
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     613-738-3503


SOURCE Cognos
Web Site: http://www.cognos.com