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Crystal Decisions Improves the Quality of Life for Patients

Crystal Decisions, an information infrastructure company that is a market leader in reporting, analysis and information delivery, announced that Intermountain Health Care is improving the quality of life of its patients with Crystal Decisions, while at the same time aiming to save an estimated $650,000 in annual development and maintenance costs.

Intermountain Health Care, serving the health needs among the 2.4 million Utah and Idaho residents, will be able to pass those savings back into the community via improved healthcare and their charitable assistance program.

Intermountain Health Care is utilizing Crystal Decisions' enterprise reporting solution for accessing information stored in its data warehouse -- the world's largest multi-generational clinical data repository. "With Crystal Decisions, hospital analysts are able to spend more time working with clinicians and department heads in our 22 hospitals applying the knowledge they have learned to improve clinical care processes," said Dale Sanders, director of enterprise data warehousing at Intermountain Health Care. "We are already meeting with doctor's to discover why the breast conservation rate differs across our facilities. Performing less invasive forms of treatment in place of radical mastectomies will improve quality of life for our breast cancer patients."

Continued Sanders: "Our fundamental goal is to discover the optimum treatment protocols for a variety of diseases. Currently, we are applying Crystal Decisions to our Cancer program, but will eventually roll it out to Cardiovascular, Women & Newborns and Primary Care. In the Cancer program, Crystal Decisions is already allowing us to gain a better understanding of our clinical processes that will improve our patients' lives, and at the same time reduce the overall cost of health care delivery. For example, we are studying mastectomy rates across our hospitals in hopes of minimizing the need for this traumatic procedure while at the same time improving long-term survival of our breast cancer patients. We are also measuring the time between appointments for our cancer patients to ensure that we deliver the most timely care possible. Cancer is a very personal disease for my family and our friends so this is an extremely rewarding project."

Intermountain Health Care not only reduces the overall cost of health care delivery, but also experiences tremendous cost-savings. Intermountain Health Care plans to deliver those savings back into the community -- adding to the more than $33 million allocated to charitable assistance last year.

"Although we are still early in the deployment, we expect Crystal Decisions will reduce the amount of time our analysts spend programming quality assurance reports in our four regions by an estimated 16,000 hours a year," said Sanders. "When we roll out to our other regions and corporate business units, we expect to save over $650,000 in the administration and programming of these reports. We can then pass those savings back to the community in charitable assistance and lower insurance costs. And these are the hard costs; the soft costs -- improving our patients' health while reducing their costs -- are more difficult to quantify, but much more important."

"Intermountain Health Care has put its trust in Crystal Decisions to not only deliver on improved health care for its patients, but also deliver an enterprise reporting solution across its entire organization that works alongside the world's largest clinical data warehouse," said Bill Gibson, chief operating officer, Crystal Decisions. "Having our solutions impact the lives of people in a positive way is extremely rewarding. We are proud of the services Intermountain Health Care is able to provide to its patients -- this is an extraordinary win-win situation."

For More Information

For more information on Crystal Decisions technologies and services, phone 800-877-2340 (North America) or 604-681-3435 (International), or visit the Crystal Decisions Web site at www.crystaldecisions.com.

About Intermountain Health Care

Intermountain Health Care is a charitable, community-owned nonprofit health care organization based in Salt Lake City that serves the health needs of Utah and Idaho residents. The IHC system includes health insurance plans, 22 hospitals, clinics and affiliated physicians. Last year, in 133,000 cases, IHC hospitals and associated clinics provided more than $33 million in charitable assistance. A central part of IHC's mission is to provide quality medical care to persons with a medical need, regardless of ability to pay. Intermountain Health Care can be found on the Web at www.ihc.com.

About Crystal Decisions

Crystal Decisions, formerly Seagate Software, is a privately held Seagate company owned by a group of investors that include Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group. Crystal Decisions is an information infrastructure company, which provides award-winning reporting, analysis, and information delivery solutions. The company's world-class products are used by millions of customers in thousands of companies worldwide and include, Crystal Analysis, Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Reports and Holos.

Contact Crystal Decisions Corp, Kristine Berry, 604-647-8557, kristine.berry@crystaldecisions.com.