Vitria's Newest Healthcare Solution Gives Healthcare Organizations A Competitive Advantage

SAN DIEGO, HEALTHCARE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS SOCIETY CONFERENCE, Feb. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Vitria(R) , the leading provider of business process integration solutions, today announced Claims Transaction Manager(TM), a fully HIPAA-compliant solution for healthcare organizations, enabling total visibility and control over claims from intake through provider remittance.

A strong healthcare industry demand for claims transaction management is being driven by the need to reduce administrative costs while providing intensive lifecycle measurability and visibility. Building on an organization's existing legacy systems and applications, Vitria's Claims Transaction Manager routes, controls, and tracks claims across the back office through a single point of control. This process- and rules-driven approach to claims transaction management enables compliance with HIPAA and state 'prompt-pay' laws, exception processing and management, while leveraging existing Information Technology (IT) investments. Claims Transaction Manager also provides real-time, end-to-end visibility down to the granularity of a single claim.

"The $1.4 trillion healthcare industry is one area of growth in the current economy, but it is also under a great deal of pressure, from increased regulatory demands to heightened customer expectations," said Shawn Willett, principal analyst, Current Analysis. "It is imperative for healthcare organizations to optimize claims processes in order to remain competitive. Vitria's healthcare solutions enable managers to create new cross-application and cross-boundary business processes, including centralized exception processing, which can potentially lower the costs of dealing with claims related issues. This could allow healthcare organizations to reduce daily operating costs and spend more time focused on partners, customers and members."

Business Benefits Of Claims Transaction Manager

The U.S. health care system spends approximately $350 billion on administrative expenses. Claims Transaction Manager directly affects this growing concern as it enables organizations to reduce administrative costs, while at the same time improving customer service. Enabling end-to-end visibility of the claims process, Vitria's solution improves compliance with specific contractual or service-level agreement and improves the use of scarce resources to control and manage claims exceptions. Claims Transaction Manager also allows for consistent claims and eligibility service experiences across the Web, call center, interactive voice response and other channels.

Claims processing typically spans multiple legacy systems, including intake, pre-adjudication, claims adjudication, and separate member, provider, and benefit plan databases. Claims Transaction Manager, built with co-development partners and customers, utilizes Vitria's award-winning BusinessWare(R) integration platform. The core technology allows for trading partner connectivity, translations between different data formats and meanings, integration with back-office systems, and business process modelling and execution.

Management By Exception

Exception processing enables healthcare companies to preserve and extend their existing investments, maximize the productivity of specialists who process exceptions, reduce enterprise risk, and avoid disruption and excessive capital outlays. The ability to model and automatically execute service level agreements and regulatory requirements such as prompt-pay legislation, not only gives health care organizations control of this business process, it also encourages improved relations throughout the organization, and across trading partners, customers and members. Having this real-time information available along with the capability of triggering human interaction when necessary, enables proactive management of claims to help identify exception trends and resolve errors at the point of intake.

With an underlying claims repository, Claims Transaction Manager also provides healthcare organizations with a pre-built customizable claims dashboard for a bird's-eye view of claim throughput and productivity. Claims Transaction Manager enables the tracking of individual claims as well as thousands of batch claims. This increased visibility of the entire claims process, provides decision makers with the crucial information they need, enabling them to free up full-time employees to resolve pended claims and manage member and provider interactions.

"It is quite common for healthcare organizations to have built their technology infrastructures one piece at a time over a number of months or years," said Bob Golladay, vice president of Healthcare, Vitria. "Consequently, these companies are left with multiple applications that don't know how to speak to each other - and without a single, comprehensive system that was originally designed to handle the entire claims submission process. Vitria's Claims Transaction Manager enables companies to integrate their disparate systems and applications in order to leverage existing technology infrastructures without having to invest heavily in new systems. By reducing the time spent troubleshooting a myriad of IT issues, healthcare employees are now free to focus on improved customer service and partner relations."

Also announced today is Vitria's Care Integrator healthcare solution. Please see today's related press release.

Vitria Solutions Showcased At HIMSS View Vitria's solutions at the Healthcare Information Manager Systems Society Conference (HIMSS), Feb. 10-15 at the San Diego Convention Center, booth 4400 in San Diego, California.

About Vitria's Healthcare Solutions

Vitria's healthcare solutions, based on the BusinessWare(R) business process integration platform, streamline healthcare administration, simplify deployment, reduce costs and improve business competitiveness. Vitria's specific healthcare solutions include Care Integrator(TM), Claims Transaction Manager(TM), Vitria's Collaborative Application(TM) (VCA) for HIPAA, and HIPAA Fast Forward(TM). Leading healthcare companies are using Vitria solutions, including Availity, Aventis, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Arizona, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oklahoma, Cardinal Health, Guardian, Humana, Mennonite Mutual Aid, and PacifiCare Health Systems.

About Vitria

Vitria is the leading provider of business process integration solutions. The company pioneered the enterprise application integration market in 1994 and the use of business process management in 1997, and is now the first integration solution provider to solve integration challenges through collaborative applications. With 35 offices around the world, Vitria's customer base includes such companies as Bell South, The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, BP, DaimlerChrysler Bank, Dana, Generali, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, PacifiCare Health Systems, Reynolds and Reynolds, Schneider Logistics, Sprint, Trane, and Trans Union, and the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veteran's Affairs. For more information call +1-408-212-2700, email info@vitria.com or visit www.vitria.com.

NOTE: Vitria, BusinessWare, Care Integrator, Claims Transaction Manager, HIPAA Fast Forward and Vitria's Collaborative Application (VCA) for HIPAA are trademarks or registered trademarks of Vitria Technology, Inc. All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements: This press release includes forward-looking statements, including statements relating to new products, future revenue growth, goals and future business opportunities that are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those referred to in the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: failure to meet financial and product expectations of analysts and investors: risk related to market acceptance of Vitria's products and alliance partners' products; deployment delays or errors associated with these and other products of Vitria and partners; hardware platform incompatibilities; the need to maintain and enhance certain business relationships with system integrators and other parties; the ability to manage growth; activities by Vitria and others regarding protection of proprietary information; release of competitive products and other actions by competitors; risks associated with possible delisting from the stock market on which Vitria's securities are listed; and economic conditions in domestic and foreign markets. These and other risks related to Vitria are detailed in Vitria's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended Dec. 31, 2001, filed with the SEC on March 29, 2002, and in Vitria's quarterly reports on Form 10-Q as filed with the SEC. The final decisions regarding specific features, pricing, and availability of the products mentioned in the press release are to be determined at the sole discretion of the Company. Vitria does not undertake an obligation to update forward-looking statements.

Vitria

CONTACT: Stephanie Von Allmen of FitzGerald Communications,
+1-650-264-1424, or svonallmen@fitzgerald.com, for Vitria; or Caroline Japic
of Vitria, +1-650-619-4162, or cjapic@vitria.com

Web site: http://www.vitria.com/