NDCHealth Announces Completion Of ArcLight Data Integration Into Its Intelligent Health Repository

ATLANTA, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NDCHealth Corporation , a leading provider of healthcare technology and information solutions, today announced that it has completed the successful integration of ArcLight’s prescription claims data into the Intelligent Health Repository (IHR), NDCHealth’s longitudinal, multi-channel U.S. healthcare claims database. The data integration significantly enhances IHR’s market research offerings, as well as the precision of NDCHealth’s IHR-centric suite of products.

In late 2003, NDCHealth announced its strategic alliance with ArcLight Systems LLC, a pharmacy data partnership comprised of leading retail chain pharmacies and a major healthcare products and services company.

“NDCHealth has leveraged its broad connectivity in the healthcare sector and exclusive agreement with ArcLight to capture unique data that will deliver unparalleled market insight through what we believe is now the industry’s best longitudinal healthcare information database,” said Walter Hoff, chairman and chief executive officer, NDCHealth. “This project involved extensive due diligence to ensure data integrity and security, as well as changes to our operational infrastructure. With its successful completion, NDCHealth is positioned to offer differentiated market analysis to enable customers to better understand the effectiveness of drug treatments, reasons for non- compliance to drug regimens and to gain insight that will help to improve formulary and pricing decisions. By tying medication utilization to diagnosis and medical procedures, IHR will ultimately help to measure the quality and effectiveness of healthcare.”

The ArcLight data integration project increased IHR’s longitudinal patient population by 30%, which now totals more than 113 million de-identified, unique patients linked to their prescription activity. IHR prescription claims data volume also increased by 30%, enabling significant additional linkage of pharmacy claims to existing IHR medical claims. IHR now contains 37 months of longitudinal patient data, representing more than four billion claims in total. In 2005, 1.8 billion total prescription and medical claims are expected to be added to the repository through direct ArcLight data feeds. Ultimately, the IHR will grow to 48 rolling months of data.

The additional ArcLight prescription claims data also creates greater reliability for trending within smaller prescription claims segments, such as cash and Medicaid prescription claims. This new mix of prescription claim segmentation will create opportunities for NDCHealth to perform higher quality research studies, in areas such as lifestyle drugs that may not be covered by third-party payers. Going forward, NDCHealth expects to offer additional products that support prescriber targeting and messaging opportunities.

NDCHealth’s Intelligent Health Repository longitudinal healthcare claims database meets all applicable information protection requirements set forth by HIPAA.

About NDCHealth

NDCHealth is a leading information solutions company serving all sectors of healthcare. Its network solutions have long been among the nation’s leading, automating the exchange of information among pharmacies, payers, hospitals and physicians. Its systems and information management solutions help improve operational efficiencies and business decision making for providers, retail pharmacy and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Headquartered at Atlanta, Ga., the company provides information vital to the delivery of healthcare every day. For more information, visit http://www.ndchealth.com/ .

NDCHealth Corporation

CONTACT: Robin Wrinn of NDCHealth Corporation, +1-404-728-2214, orrobin.wrinn@ndchealth.com