IRVINE, Calif., March 14, 2000 (PRIMEZONE) -- (www.ibchannel.com) - IBC is pleased to announce today that it has named MedCom USA (Nasdaq:EMED) as eHealth Company of the new Millenium.
Thanks to a superb management team and cutting edge technical breakthroughs, MedCom USA has grown from a market cap of under $10 million in 1999 to over $250 million at today's stock price of approximately $7 - a 52 week gain of over 800%, outpacing the S & P by over 750% according to Yahoo March 13, 1999.
Although the company has recently seen its stock receive a fairer market valuation, its market cap it extremely low compared to its peers.At the high end of the range Healtheon/WebMd Corp. boasts over a $6 Billion Market cap. If MedCom USA were attain the same capitalization its stock price would have to trade between $175 to $200 per share. On the low end of the range, Medscape Inc. trades at about a $400 Million Market Cap. If MedCom were to hit this number, its stock would have to trade at $12.50 to $14.00 per share.
MedCom USA was named one of the fastest growing companies by Deloitte and Touche for 1998. In their annual Technology Fast 500 List Deloitte & Touche ranked MedCom USA the 60th fastest growing technology company in America and the 3rd fastest growing technology company in Orange County California .
Medcom USA may be proclaimed the CMGI of the eHealth and eMedical market. It currently operates three units: MedCom USA, Inc. provides innovative solutions for electronically processing transactions within the healthcare industry. The Company's healthcare business units include: MedCard, a service package for physicians, clinics and hospitals that has been endorsed by the New York County and Suffolk County Medical Associations; JustMed.com, a pure play Internet healthcare Web site; and Med Store, an e-commerce site for selling home medical equipment (HME) products. MedCom's Internet address is www.medcom.net and MedCom's healthcare portal is www.justmed.com.
Additionally on March 9, 2000 MedCom announced that it has signed a letter of intent to acquire DCB Actuaries & Consultants. DCB is a member of an international network of actuarial consulting firms, Woodrow Milliman, an international network of actuarial and consulting firms represented in 34 countries, employing over 3,000 people worldwide. DCB was formed in 1991 and currently employs approximately 65 professionals, primarily highly qualified software engineers, actuaries and consultants.
"The acquisition is expected to be very beneficial to MedCom; in a single transaction, MedCom will now have the capability to provide a comprehensive technological solution to many of the problems currently plaguing the healthcare environment. Other companies have been trying to build an organization that can offer the capability of DCB's current products. We will be able to offer these services without the integration and development issues facing these other groups, since DCB is already operating such a system overseas. Their system is operational and it works," said Mr. Mark E. Bennett, President and CEO of MedCom USA, Inc.
DCB developed and currently operates a health insurance decision support system with advanced data-structures covering 35 dimensions of attributes. The health insurance data warehouse consists of a three-year history of over 100 million care performance records, representing 1.6 million insured lives. The system combines the Teradata data warehouse with MicroStrategy's relational OLAP architecture data mining tools to provide an effective application for browsing and analyzing the high volumes of data and, subsequently, for making the best use of the knowledge gained.
DCB has formed associations and relationships with many top companies, including Woodrow Milliman, MicroStrategy, Bacon & Woodrow and NCR Corporation. DCB is identified as a partner on MicroStrategy's web ite.
"DCB's products will be valuable tools for the US healthcare industry. They can function in a hospital or provide valuable data for insurance providers. The intuitive outcomes statistics data functions are extraordinary. The only piece that DCB was missing was the insurance billing and verification, and we have that segment with our MedCard System. We are working with the same potential customers and contacts. That is why this is such an ideal match. By closing this single transaction we will leapfrog ahead in many aspects of healthcare technology. DCB's addition to MedCom will go hand in hand with our existing and planned products and services. We will be able to capitalize on this wealth of talent to expand on the development of our other projects, including the MedCard System," added Mr. Bennett.
DCB's Evidence Based Medicine Systems (EBMS) allow a physician to monitor a patient's status from their home or office. They can view x-rays, EKG's and other critical data at any time. Patients' entire history can be made available to the attending physician. Plus, each patient's course of treatment can be separately tracked and even monitored against a standard course of action based upon the patient's conditions and symptoms through the outcomes data functions. However, DCB's products provide more than just patient information. They can provide the hospital or insurance provider vital financial data about their operations. These organizations will be able to receive more comprehensive and better data at the touch of a button. DCB's Health Infocenter and Health Data Analyzer applications move health care organizations beyond traditional e-business to Intelligent E-Business, while increasing effectiveness and quality of health care services, strengthening customer/patient loyalty and creating virtual health care organizations and health insurance companies' concepts by replicating the functionality of a live standard organization. The fully integrated Web interface systems can access different types of data -- structured and non-structured -- stored in a variety of data sources via standard Internet communication devices (i.e. automatically generating a personal Web page or E-mail). This live Business Intelligence and E-Commerce solution allows the user to analyze, personalize, subscribe and distribute health care information and data via different devices for different types of users.
Beside business intelligence and e-commerce applications, DCB has developed special data statistical applications that sit on top of large data warehouse databases. The Analytical Module is designed to provide users with advanced statistical analysis over large health care data sets. The Treatment Episode and Profiling Analyzer create dynamic (multi-variant) treatment pathways from the atomic claims data in the data warehouse according to different risk adjustment factors. They generate multi-paramater benchmarks for "best Practice", risk adjusted performance and quality for provider profiling.
MedCom will acquire 100% of the stock of DCB, which is based in the Czech Republic, in a transaction that will be accounted for as a purchase. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition, which is subject to the successful completion of due diligence by MedCom, is expected to close in the quarter ending June 30, 2000. DCB currently has other projects and proposals in other European countries, including the UK, as well as the US. For the year ended December 31, 1999, DCB's unaudited revenues totaled approximately 85,500,000Kc (US $2,500,000).
NCR and Teradata are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCR Corporation in the United States and other countries.
MicroStrategy and Intelligent E-Business are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries.
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