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Successful Partnership and Common Vision Lead to Emageon and UltraVisual Merging Operations

 

BIRMINGHAM, AL - (June 5, 2003) - Emageon, a leading provider of enterprise solutions for medical image storage, distribution and workflow and UltraVisual Medical Systems, a leading developer of enterprise medical image visualization software, have merged their operations. Shareholders of both companies approved the merger, effective May 30, 2003. The merged company headquarters will be in Birmingham, AL, with visualization software development continuing in Madison, WI.
“Unlike many mergers that predict or hope for product synergies, the merger of Emageon and UltraVisual is based on actual, proven synergies already in place with customers,” said Chuck Jett, Emageon’s CEO and Chairman. “The combination of Emageon and UltraVisual is re-setting the bar for the medical imaging industry for enterprise scalability, price/performance and advanced visualization.”

Jett added, “We believe both companies’ early commitment to DICOM, HL7, and IHE standards and hardware independence has positioned us as the market leader in open systems and low total cost of ownership. Our merged open platforms will create further value to our customers by facilitating seamless integration to high-end specialty and disease specific applications from a world-wide community of innovative, standards-based developers.”
Mark Gehring, UltraVisual’s co-founder, CEO and Chairman continued, “This merger has been clinically ‘road tested.’ We are thriving at customer sites. Success was the catalyst for bringing everyone under one roof – 18 hospitals in the past two quarters is an excellent start.”

Responsiveness to Market & Technology Demands
“Each company has emphasized meeting the demands of the industry. Rather than focusing on imaging departments alone, buyers with an enterprise-wide vision are demanding solutions committed to recognized standards that meet the performance and scalability demands of their environment. Ultimately, they create image value for their entire enterprise – not just one or two departments,” said Milton Silva-Craig, Emageon’s Chief Operating Officer. “Our combined solution further enhances our ability to improve the quality of care that can be delivered by improving service to referring physicians. By streamlining hospital operations involving medical imaging, our solution has enabled hospitals to increase referrals and assist in the recruitment of new physicians.”

Gehring elaborated, “We now have a complete solution - technology and services that ensure the system’s success, including enterprise-wide adoption to make physicians and medical staff as efficient and effective as possible. As a result, patients can receive enhanced quality of care and experience faster service.”

Common Technology Vision
“The two companies share a common technology vision and strategy. We focus on delivering peak performance with extraordinary quality at a competitive cost,” said Gehring. "Our merger with Emageon leverages the technical strengths of both companies to bring superior products to market. For example, we immediately recognized technical synergies in open standards like Java and IHE. We saw additional corporate synergies that would allow us to continue to produce innovative products with the same level of quality that we have delivered historically."
Gehring added, “Our technology strategies take advantage of off-the-shelf hardware and avoid proprietary approaches. Our common philosophy of rigorous software design requires strict adherence to standards and open system principles. We have engineered our software to store, process and deliver patient images and related information using less hardware than competitive offerings. Emageon offers a unique set of technology adoption services designed to maximize productivity of radiologists, specialists and primary care physicians. UltraVisual’s software delivers on the same idea -- it offers advanced visualization to all physicians while providing a variety of innovative approaches to make sure the system is easy to use and enables intelligent workflow.”

Customer Reactions
Customer reactions to these merged solutions have been very positive.

Southeast Missouri Hospital
"We were not willing to compromise and accept the status quo - a proprietary-based, clinical PACS offered by the traditional vendors," said Pat Bira, Southeast Missouri Hospital's Assistant Administrator. "From the outset, we committed to deploy an enterprise image management system built on open standards, following the IHE framework and offering high availability and ‘best-of-class’ options. The solutions of the combined companies were able to achieve all of our goals with far more value than older, less effective technologies."

“We have been very pleased with the Emageon/UltraVisual system,” commented Thomas J. Welch, Radiology Director at Southeast Missouri Hospital in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. “When we decided to invest in a PACS system, we wanted to do business with a vendor who supported open standards. We also wanted an infrastructure that would support enterprise-wide information storage. Emageon/UltraVisual was the best combination that met our needs.”

Welch added, “UltraVisual’s thin-client technology and integrated advanced visualization features were two major factors that influenced Southeast’s decision. “We think this type of system is the wave of the future.”

Both Emageon and UltraVisual were able to adapt to challenges posed during installation. “They were very willing to consider suggestions we made along the way and either implement them or give us a timeline for future implementation,” Welch explained. “We experienced very few bumps during the implementation process due to the adoption success philosophy used by Emageon and UltraVisual.”

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