CareScience Names Select Practice National Quality Leaders in Annual Clinical Outcomes Report

CareScience, a division of Quovadx, Inc. (NASDAQ:QVDX) providing care management, clinical analysis and clinical quality improvement solutions, today announced the results of its 2006 Select Practice National Quality Leader reports. The CareScience Select Practice reports reflect hospitals’ overall organizational focus on quality and efficiency of patient care and recognize distinction in excellent patient outcomes. Hospitals across the nation were eligible for consideration in this year’s Select Practice National Quality Leader reports, and are reported by peer hospitals in size and focus from across the country. CareScience Select Practice National Quality Leader hospitals represent elite performers amongst the 4,500 acute care hospitals in the United States in clinical quality and efficiency, both for overall facility performance and in disease specific categories, as identified by the CareScience™ Select Practice methodology. The 2006 CareScience Select Practice National Quality Leader – Top 1% Facilities report identifies the top 45 elite facilities from across the country. The 2006 report, when evaluating geographic representation, shows that 16 of these elite facilities are from the Midwest, 14 from the Northeast, 11 are in the Southeast and four are from the Western part of the United States. The state of Florida, with eight facilities named, had the highest representation on the report, followed by the state of Massachusetts with seven. Additionally, more than half (53 percent) of the Top 1% facilities included in the Select Practice National Quality Leader results were non-teaching hospitals and the average bed size for all ranked hospitals was 251. The 2006 CareScience Select Practice National Quality Leader – Disease Specific report identifies the top performing facilities in each of seven specific disease areas. Only 12 facilities were recognized in three or more separate disease group categories. Of those 12 facilities, only six hospitals were recognized as elite performers in the Top 1% Facilities report in addition to their distinction for excellence in three of the Disease Specific reports: Cape Cod Hospital (Hyannis, MA) Cooley Dickinson Hospital (Northampton, MA) Lake Wales Medical Center (Lake Wales, FL) Providence St. Peter Hospital (Olympia, WA) Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center (Mattoon, IL) Sarasota Memorial Hospital (Sarasota, FL) "The 2006 CareScience Select Practice National Quality Leaders report spotlights the important work of our nation’s hospitals in the drive toward improved patient care and increased efficiencies,” said Richard Bankowitz, MD, MBA, vice president and medical director, CareScience. "We believe the CareScience Select Practice National Quality Leader award recipients represent the country’s very best healthcare facilities for overall patient care based on objective measures of clinical outcomes and efficiency. We are extremely pleased to award these organizations with a Select Practice designation and hope that the Select Practice reports will contribute to the nation’s effort to improve efficiencies and ultimately, the quality of patient care.” CareScience Select Practice designations are based on the CareScience risk-adjusted methodology, which pinpoints true quality and efficiency through comprehensive patient population - including as many as 16 different clinical indicators. This clinical approach to risk adjustment provides hospitals and patients with more objective information on hospital quality as compared with other national hospital rankings that rely more heavily on financially based risk adjustment and fewer than half the number of specific factors than those included in the CareScience methodology. In addition, while many existing reports today use unquantifiable data, such as physician perception and hospital reputation in equal weight to clinical quality measures when developing hospital rankings, CareScience Select Practice National Quality Leader reports do not. Disease specific Select Practice reports include: Acute myocardial infarction treated with PCI (excluding valve and bypass surgery) Cardiac bypass surgery (excluding acute myocardial infarction and valve surgery) Heart failure Medically managed acute myocardial infarction Pneumonia Ischemic stroke Total hip replacement CareScience Select Practice Methodology CareScience Select Practice rankings are created using the CareScience Select Practice methodology, which uses both quality and efficiency dimensions to measure hospital performance. CareScience Select Practice reports measure quality by the incidence of three outcomes: mortality, morbid complications, and complications, which are combined into a single quality index. Next, the Select Practice model rates efficiency using length-of-stay (LOS) as a proxy for resource usage and cost. Together, quality and efficiency indicators are used to evaluate hospital performance. These calculations result in an increased emphasis on clinical outcomes data as compared with other quality awards. The combined quality and efficiency rating determines the CareScience annual Select Practice recipients. All acute care inpatient facilities in the United States that met the minimum case discharge volume requirement in a given disease category were eligible to receive a national CareScience Select Practice designation. The annual 2006 CareScience Select Practice National Quality Leader reports and related methodology are now available at www.carescience.com/go/spnational. About CareScience & CareScience™ Select Practice National Quality Leader Reports CareScience, a division of Quovadx, Inc. (NASDAQ:QVDX), assists hospitals in translating organizational vision and goals into quality improvement plans that optimize patient outcomes and operational performance, increase staff efficiency and reduce costs. CareScience supplies the people and technology to help its customers ensure that high-quality care is delivered, throughout the healthcare system, through clinical data access and clinical process transformation. For more information, please visit www.carescience.com. The annual CareScience Select Practice Quality Leader recipients are identified through the use of the CareScience™ Select Practice methodology, which employs both quality and efficiency dimensions to rank hospital performance. CareScience Select Practice rankings are an indication of organizational focus, improvement and achievement in providing excellence in the quality of patient care. Please visit www.carescience.com for more information. QUOVADX and CareScience are trademarks of Quovadx, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.