MARINA DEL REY, Calif., April 5, 2005 -- PortBlue Corporation (www.portblue.com), a leader in transforming knowledge into software through expert systems technology, today announced that the company has been selected by Amerinet (www.amerinet-gpo.com), a leading national healthcare purchasing organization, as a preferred provider of disaster management systems.

PortBlue captures the human know-how that makes a person a recognized expert and transforms this knowledge into work process software. PortBlue's interactive, online applications effectively act as a mentor, using the same frameworks, logic, rules of thumb, processes, and reference materials an expert would apply in completing a task or making a decision.

Amerinet member hospitals will now have access to PortBlue's comprehensive Hospital Incident Response System (HIRS). Tailored to help meet disaster readiness and response requirements of the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Hospital Organizations (JCAHO) and agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), HIRS will help hospitals more efficiently prepare for and manage a full range of incidents from "routine" emergencies to mass casualty events. The system assists staff through key processes in all three stages of disaster management: pre-incident, during an incident and post-incident.

"A good Disaster Management Plan requires a level of expertise, training, resources and preparedness that can be costly in time and money and compete with a host of other demands on a hospital," said Paul Dimitruk, PortBlue's founder and CEO. "For most hospitals, it is daunting to keep up with what are currently the best practices in the field of disaster management and to know how to gain access to the right expertise. Yet the pressure to create and maintain a solid Disaster Management Plan is rising and won't go away. This pressure is coming from many fronts, most importantly from JCAHO."

"Amerinet is at the forefront of bringing innovative solutions to the healthcare industry," Dimitruk said. "We are delighted with Amerinet's recognition that recent developments in expert system capabilities support their use in hospital disaster management. Expert systems are now much faster, more economical and more flexible to build and to maintain. The right expert systems can help preserve a hospital's reputation and commitment to its community for patient care, both on ordinary days and on extraordinary days -- benefits that will now accrue to Amerinet members."

"PortBlue's knowledge-based approach to disaster management systems makes sense both clinically and from a business perspective," said Ron Miller, vice president, Amerinet. "With such an expert system -- and its ability to self-tailor to the particular incident at hand -- our member hospitals can look forward to concrete savings in the number of staff called upon to respond, the supplies consumed, the equipment deployed, and the duration of the response."

Prior to an incident, the PortBlue system leverages best practices from recognized experts to guide the development of a customized Disaster Management Plan (DMP) for "All-Hazards" (e.g., chemical, biological, radiological, natural, etc.). During an incident, the system applies the tailored plan via a web-interface to coordinate and provide job action sheets for all involved personnel using the most recent information available. Once the incident is over, the system reviews staff activities and resources deployed in the incident to capture lessons learned, identify possible remedial steps and document reimbursement opportunities. HIRS can be configured to specific environments, from large metropolitan to small rural hospitals.

In addition to HIRS, PortBlue provides the healthcare industry with a series of:

-- Planner Modules that help ensure a rigorous approach to capital investment decisions and financial analysis, leveraging expert know-how to help identify additional revenue sources, cost drivers, and profitability levers.

-- Benchmarking Modules that allow hospital administrators to identify and adopt best practices by comparing their financial and operational metrics to comparable facilities and capturing opportunities for cost reduction and productivity improvement.

PortBlue's most distinctive competencies include:

-- Knowledge engineering capabilities -- the ability to elicit the know-how of subject-matter experts and best practices effectively and quickly, and to convert these into Web-based mentoring and work process tools.

-- An extremely fast development cycle -- the ability to produce finished subject-matter applications in weeks and modify them in days or even hours, helping to avoid the often negative outcomes of protracted conventional software development.

About PortBlue

Founded in Los Angeles in 2000, PortBlue Corporation (www.portblue.com) provides a highly innovative system for building web-based expert applications. The practical know-how of recognized experts is rapidly transformed into web-based training and work process tools and systems in the form of PortBlue hosted applications accessible 24/7. PortBlue's proprietary technology effectively acts as a mentor, guiding users -- be they employees, customers, or trainees -- through tasks and processes to optimal decisions and outcomes.

PortBlue applications customize to the user's specific context and facts and produce concrete results (e.g., a report, assessment or recommendation), delivering sophisticated applications at a fraction of the cost and time required to develop conventional software. Traditionally, expert systems have been very expensive to develop, normally taking years of effort, and have been very difficult to modify once built. PortBlue's founding purpose was to provide its customers with high-value expert systems that could be built and modified faster, more flexibly and more economically, by orders of magnitude.

About Amerinet

St. Louis-based Amerinet (www.amerinet-gpo.com) is one of the most innovative and effective health care group purchasing organizations in the United States, partnering with members to improve their operating margins. Amerinet's national network of companies -- Amerinet Central, Intermountain Health Care and Vector -- set the standard for customer service. More than 1,860 hospitals and 22,000 non-acute care facilities find cost savings and value-added services through Amerinet's comprehensive portfolio.

Christian Maas, 310-566-7222
christian.maas@portblue.com