Today’s Cure to Healthcare Costs: Individual Control
& Real-Time Access to Key Decision Making Information

U-BeWell™ Real-Time Access Technology to e-Health Records will put
“Your Health in Your Hands” and will be available for demonstration at the HIT Symposium at MIT (June 29 - July 2, 2009).

SAN DIEGO, California--June 23, 2009  

While Congress and the nation struggle to provide affordable and quality healthcare for all, the unsustainable rising costs of our healthcare system have emerged as today’s central issue in the healthcare reform debate

Among the most commonly discussed measures to curb the cost of healthcare are: the practice of prevention, proven and effective diagnostics and treatments, and the system-wide use and access to electronic health records by healthcare providers and individuals alike.

Most agree that such cost-reduction measures will not only help reduce the nation’s and individuals’ healthcare expenditures, but will also help more people live healthier and more productive lives at a time when obesity and other preventable conditions lead to chronic diseases and disability of epidemic proportions. The economic and healthcare crisis, which is now center stage in our country, creates an imperative to act without waiting.

However, some will rightfully argue that prevention or health information technology will not deliver full solutions until many years from now. This is true when considering traditional means of either practicing prevention (physician-driven care with little individual control and participation), or when looking at current healthcare IT systems (which are fairly complex to use, not accessible to individuals and lack interoperability, preventing them from supporting the delivery of cost-efficient and quality healthcare).

Contrary to these practices and beyond traditional health IT systems, new healthcare delivery and information technology approaches put the individual at the center and in control of their healthcare. The new healthcare paradigm calls for citizens to be engaged, informed of health risks or treatment choices and value, and given immediate access to critical information regarding treatments, tests or current medications, while still maintaining the privacy of their health records. In this way, we will not only live healthier lives but also help sustain affordable and quality healthcare for all.

With this new healthcare paradigm in mind, and building on 25 years of information technology innovation with widely used consumer-focused IT tools, Humetrix is now offering with its U-BeWell technology a timely and immediately applicable set of healthcare IT solutions.

Simple and powerful, U-BeWell was conceived by a development team with a wide array of expertise from Public Health to Pediatrics, Geriatrics or Health Economics to answer the most immediate need in today’s fragmented and uncoordinated healthcare system: providing real-time access to key health information when and where needed. As such, U-BeWell is posed to immediately help deliver on the main goals of health IT reform in allowing patients and their health care providers to directly access and exchange key clinical information (problem and medication lists, allergies, lab results, …), patient clinical summaries, decision-making tools and resource information that will help patients make informed decisions and assist physicians in managing their patients’ health.

U-BeWell is built on a proven technology developed over the years by Humetrix and uses smart portable devices (such as flash drives, smart cards and web enabled phones) to automatically and securely access web-based individual records. The U-BeWell-powered device, controlled solely by the individual device holder, provides for automated and secure on-line record access anywhere, anytime. With U-BeWell, getting access to key and up to date healthcare information every time an individual is seeking health care becomes as easy as checking for an account balance or retrieving cash from an ATM. The device-based technology, which uses the Internet as its infrastructure backbone, allows physicians or hospitals immediate access to the technology with no need for time-consuming and costly installation of new software or equipment. An immediately deployable linkage tool, U-BeWell is also today’s and tomorrow’s interconnectivity solution to current disparate health IT systems and, as such, is an attractive technology platform that can play an important role in accelerating meaningful implementation of health IT to help deliver on the goals of health care reform.

The U-BeWell technology will be demonstrated, and U-BeWell-powered demonstration flash drives will be offered to all attendees, at the Health Information Technology Symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge between June 29th and July 2nd, 2009.

About Humetrix:

Humetrix, based in San Diego, California, has been pioneering the development of widely-used innovative consumer IT solutions for the last 25 years. Humetrix offers a range of convenience and security products for automated and secure access to individual online records and data storage using smart portable devices such as smart phones, USB flash drives, smart or flash cards. For more information, visit: www.humetrix.com and www.u-bewell.com.