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Biotech / Medical : CYBR CyberCare the new look of healthcare -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sommovigo who wrote (2308)	6/21/2000 7:45:00 PM
From: StockDung	Respond to of 3392

Latest from Herb Green from RealMoney.com saga continues sorry, folks. The Cyber-Care (CYBR:Nasdaq - news - boards) saga continues (sorry, folks, but there is just so much questionable activity that the columns can't help but keep coming): As previously reported, the Food and Drug Administration approved two of the company's Internet-related electronic housecall patient-monitoring systems. But the company had three Internet devices, and the one that wasn't approved was the only one designed for home use. Or, as I reported Monday afternoon , so said the description for the product on Cyber-Care's Web site. Within hours of writing that, I received an email with a link to a message board post that blasted me for not getting my story right. That post included a link to Cyber-Care's Web site showing that one of the devices that had been approved, the EHC 400, also is for home use. But wait, Martinez (as in Mark, my sidekick) had copied the page from the Web site early Monday morning and it said nothing about home use for the EHC 400. In fact, before Monday night the Web-site description of the EHC 400 never said anything about the product being for home use. What happened? Well... sometime late Monday, Cyber-Care took down its site (for scheduled maintenance, according to a message on the site) and when it came back up, the EHC 400 suddenly included home use as part of its description. Why the change on the EHC 400? And why wasn't the third product, the EHC 500, approved? Mark has left numerous messages with Cyber-Care and the rep from its new P.R. firm, Citigate Dewe Rogerson. (The one time Mark did talk to the P.R. rep, when she answered the phone, he was told a number of people asked the same question.) So, what's the answer? And why was the description of the EHC 400 suddenly changed after I first raised the issue in a Monday column? Nobody from Cyber-Care apparently knows, or wants to say, because nobody has returned any of Mark's phone calls. But get a load of this: Mark went back to Cyber-Care's Web site on Tuesday night and Cyber-Care was back to its old switcheroo tactics again. While it hadn't issued a press release, it added back an asterisk next to the description of the EHC 500. The asterisk (which had been missing for three days) refers to a footnote that says, without elaboration, the product still hasn't been approved and can't be marketed or distributed in the U.S. And while on Cyber-Care: To build credibility for its Internet system, Cyber-Care has implied in several press releases, almost as a standard disclosure, that its Internet device has been included "in extensive clinical trials for more than three years with the U.S. Army, the Mayo Clinic and others. The Company anticipates volume shipments in the latter part of first Quarter of 2000." Oh, yeah? "For now, we have never even seen it," Mayo Clinic spokeswoman Carol Chaffin says of the Internet product. "We have no plans to use any version at this point." Besides, she adds, "It is premature to say what we will be doing with the telemedicine technology at this time; We are still looking into the technology at this point." At the end of the day, she says, "It is too early to say when and with whom" Mayo will do business. "We have not committed to anything yet." So, if Mayo says it hasn't even seen the Internet product, why does Cyber include Mayo in the same breath as "Internet" in its press releases? Could it be that the Cyber-Care technology that was tested uses plain old telephone lines -- the kind of product that isn't as sexy as something that uses the Internet? And could it be that the wording of the press release made it seem like the Internet product was being tested, when it really wasn't? Hard to say. Cyber-Care hasn't returned our calls, but this much we know: Hype hath no shame.