LINK MEDICAL ANNOUNCES PARTICIPATION IN OPEN CARDIOLOGY INITIATIVE

OPEN CARDIOLOGY INITIATIVE
The Power of many, working as one.

Orlando, Fla., Nov 10, 1997 – As a follow-up to Hewlett Packard’s announcement of the formation of the Open Cardiology Initiative (OCI), LINK Medical Computing,Inc. today affirmed its active participation in the OCI group, a consortium of leading medical technology companies. Initial members include Cambridge Heart, Hewlett Packard Company, LINK Medical Computing, Medicomp, MicroMedical, Quinton Instrument Company and Zymed.

These companies will work together to promote the implementation of visual integration technologies based on the CCOW (Clinical Context Object Workgroup) standard. It is expected that participants will also cooperate on the implementation of other standards such as HL7, DICOM, HTML and SCP in the future.

"As the only pure systems integration company in this group, we see ourselves as providing a gateway for those systems and applications that are not CCOW enabled," says Andreas Theodosiou, LINK's vice president of new business development. "CCOW is an excellent visual integration alternative for customers who do not require the transfer of data for outcomes, billing or research purposes." LINK will continue to work with those vendors and customers who require back-end integration.

LINK Medical develops and deploys interfaces using its LINKTools® suite of integration products. LINK works directly with instrument and ancillary system manufacturers and vendors to integrate their systems with each other and with hospital information systems. LINK also works directly with end-users (hospitals) to install supportable, standardized interfaces to and from selected applications and information systems.

LINK's focus, domain experience and technology is directly applicable to integrating these department level systems and distinguishes LINK from other enterprise level integration engines whose main function is the distribution of generic data throughout an enterprise.

LINK's latest release, LINKTools® for Cardiac Cath, is intelligent, standard integration software that’s guaranteed to automate the transfer of data from selected hemodynamic monitors to information systems capable of receiving HL7 transmissions. LINKTools® for Cardiac Cath draws on and combines LINK's extensive experience in cardiology with its expertise in interfacing to provide end-users with user-installable, pre-configured integration solution.