BEA Powers CBS HealthWatch and Medscape Portals to Provide Personalized Healthcare Information for 3.4 Million Members
Medscape Standardizes on BEA WebLogic, Gives Doctors and Patients Secure Access to Health Information Where, When and How They Need It
SAN JOSE, Calif., Jul 11, 2001 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS chart, msgs), one of the world's leading e-business infrastructure software companies, today announced that Medscape (Nasdaq: MDLI chart, msgs), a provider of digital health records and online medical information, chose the BEA WebLogic(R) E-Business Platform as a key component of Medscape's strategy to deliver a suite of personalized healthcare services to more than 3.4 million members.
In April 2001, CBSHealthWatch.com underwent a complete site redesign to ensure that it will remain one of the leaders of the consumer health portal category. To enhance its personalization capabilities, Medscape standardized on BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform(TM), and later this fall Medscape.com, the company's sister site for healthcare professionals, also will undergo a redesign and migration to the new corporate platform standard that includes BEA WebLogic Personalization Server(TM) and BEA Portal Framework(TM). With nearly one million page views a day, Medscape.com and CBSHealthWatch.com are among the most frequently visited healthcare portals accessed globally.
Many of Medscape's Digital Health Record applications are accessible via the Web and mobile devices, and offer personalized, secure access to drug reference guides, medical journals and chart management for its member physicians' 19 million patient records, as well as information exchange among labs, outpatient facilities and hospitals. Medscape's wide-ranging solutions also enable practitioners to interact with patients electronically to answer questions and schedule appointments, and give patients access to their medical records and disease-management information.
"During an average visit to the doctor's office, patients get five minutes of face time with a physician," said Kevin Hutchinson, chief operating officer at Medscape. "Combine that limited amount of time with cumbersome insurance procedures and rules limiting information sharing, and it's apparent that there's a need for more patient-friendly eHealth alternatives. The BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform is one of the enabling tools that helps us provide treatment data, patient histories, medical advice, lab results and other potentially life-saving information to doctors and patients when and where they need it."
BEA Portal Framework Paves the Way for Post-Merger Success
Medscape was created by a series of mergers that resulted in a number of proprietary applications and systems. The company made the decision to standardize on BEA WebLogic to leverage legacy systems and lower the cost of improving information flow across the enterprise.
"Mergers can falter because organizations don't, or can't, integrate the information from various applications and systems," said David Yakimischak, Medscape's chief technology officer. "BEA WebLogic has helped make Medscape a model for other organizations dealing with mergers. BEA WebLogic enables us to use information from various systems, tailor it for our customers and deliver it to them where, when and how they need it. When systems integrate tightly, it paves the way for people to come together, too. That's a compelling benefit and a big reason we went with BEA."
BEA Portal Framework, which leverages the features of BEA WebLogic Server and BEA WebLogic Personalization Server, offers reusable, pre-built portal functions that accelerate time-to-market, while the framework's strict compliance with Java standards greatly reduces the costs of developing and integrating new applications.
"Businesses of all types and sizes are realizing that enterprise portals can drive competitive advantage by optimizing employee productivity and creating stronger relationships with customers," said Mark Carges, president, BEA E-Commerce Application Components Division. "At the same time it's become clear that deploying isolated portals across an organization is not an effective strategy. As a market and technology leader, BEA's top-to-bottom e-business platform provides the necessary application development, management, integration, personalization, commerce and portal framework to make enterprise portals successful and deliver a high return on investment."
About Medscape
Medscape(R) is a leading provider of digital health records and online medical information. The Company delivers patient-centered, clinical healthcare data and medical information to healthcare professionals and consumers wherever that information is needed. The core of Medscape's product portfolio is the industry-leading Digital Health Record (DHR). DHR applications and services are an integral part of the practice of medicine and are used every day by physicians and consumers across the country.
Medscape's DHR enables physicians to access patient information, share data with existing systems, communicate among practice members and capture and store quantifiable data for patient-by-patient or population-based studies. The DHR also enables practice sites to interact with their patients electronically to answer questions, schedule appointments and address personal health concerns, while offering consumers private access to their medical records and related disease management information and services. More than 19 million patients now have digital records hosted on Medscape systems. Medscape is also the leading source of peer-reviewed medical information and continuing medical education on the Web. Approximately 3.4 million members, including 575,000 registered as physicians and more than 1.65 million registered as allied health professionals, use Medscape.com for immediate access to research, recent developments and information to guide their practices and support patient care. Consumers too have come to rely on CBSHealthWatch by Medscape for health information that comes from the same source their physicians use.
The integration of Medscape's authoritative Web sites with the breadth of its clinical applications and products, strengthen the physician-patient relationship at-and beyond-each encounter, resulting in a positive impact on healthcare costs, efficiencies, safety and outcomes. The merger of MedicaLogic, Inc. and Medscape, Inc., and MedicaLogic, Inc.'s acquisition of Total eMed, Inc., a privately held company, in May 2000 formed MedicaLogic/Medscape, Inc., d/b/a Medscape. The Company employs approximately 1,000 people and is headquartered in Hillsboro, Oregon |
