Press Releases

DALLAS, HIMSS, Feb 16, 2005 - Cardinal Health, Inc. (NYSE: CAH), the leading provider of products and services supporting the health care industry, reported today that the world’s first wireless smart infusion information system, the Alaris® Network is rapidly becoming the new standard among the nation's hospitals for networked IV monitoring of medication delivery at the point of care. 

To date, more than 10,000 smart wireless infusion pumps have been installed at leading hospitals around the country. The System's advantages and experience data will be presented at the annual HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) meeting in Dallas.

Joseph Condurso, director, Infusion Information Systems at Cardinal Health for Alaris® Products says, "The market reaction to our new system so far has been excellent. With its advanced wireless and networking features, it has established a new, higher level of performance that is making it the system of choice among hospitals throughout the country. In effect, we've laid the foundation for the next advances in Clinical Information Systems; enabling convergence between 'smart' medical devices and modern IT architectures, enhancing workflow and real-time clinical decision support at the point-of-care."

With adverse drug events accounting for 61 percent of the most serious and costly medication errors, it is important to have systems that can manage and monitor these medications. The Alaris® Network provides wireless connectivity to the Alaris® System, a modular point-of-care platform that integrates infusion, patient monitoring and clinical best practice guidelines for optimal outcomes at the point of care. This network capability allows the real-time capture of medication infusion, patient monitoring and continuous quality improvement (CQI) data from these devices. The analysis of these data can lead to practice improvements in patient safety and operational performance, and can lead to improvements in a hospital's financial performance as well.

"The Alaris® System outcomes contributed to statistically significant reductions in the medical intensive care unit (MICU) length of stay at the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS), which is good for the patient and for the financial margin of the hospital," reports Stephen R. Smith, MBA entity information officer, HUP and chief technology officer, UPHS. "By upgrading our investment in smart pumps to include the Alaris® Network, we hope to enable a rapid-cycle CQI methodology with real-time intervention."

With the Alaris® Network, CQI Data from the IV devices can be continuously captured, and new or modified drug libraries used with the Guardrails® Suite of safety software can be transferred, house-wide, with a single key push and with no disruption of clinical workflow. When combined with the Alaris® Gateway, which Cardinal Health is currently developing, the Alaris® Network will be able to share data with other clinical applications to provide real-time information that hospitals can act on to improve best clinical practices and outcomes.

"SHARP Health Care is deploying the Alaris® Network across our five regional hospitals connecting over 1,000 smart pumps, while managing the system out of our centralized data center," says Bill Spooner, senior vice president, and chief information officer at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego. "We view this new technology as a key component of our overall clinical information systems strategy."

"The Alaris® Network is a core platform to linking the Alaris® System with the hospitals system that captures essential clinical data and, through the Alaris® Gateway, will make that data available to a hospital's other clinical systems," Condurso concluded.

About Cardinal Health
Cardinal Health, Inc. (www.cardinalhealth.com) is the leading provider of products and services supporting the health care industry. Cardinal Health develops, manufactures packages and markets products for patient care; develops drug-delivery technologies; distributes pharmaceuticals and medical, surgical and laboratory supplies; and offers consulting and other services that improve quality and efficiency in health care. Headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, Cardinal Health employs more than 55,000 people on six continents and produces annual revenues of more than $65 billion.

Except for historical information, all other information in this news release consists of forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected, anticipated or implied. The most significant of these uncertainties are described in Cardinal Health's Form 10-K, Form 8-K and Form 10-Q reports (including all amendments to those reports) and exhibits to those reports, and include (but are not limited to) the costs, difficulties, and uncertainties related to the integration of acquired businesses, the loss of one or more key customer or supplier relationships or changes to the terms of those relationships, changes in the distribution patterns or reimbursement rates for health-care products and/or services, the results, consequences, effects or timing of any inquiry or investigation by any regulatory authority or any legal and administrative proceedings, the impact of previously announced restatements, difficulties in opening new facilities or fully utilizing existing capacity, difficulties and uncertainties associated with business model transitions, and general economic and market conditions. Cardinal Health undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement.