Nortel Introduces Significant Upgrade to Patient Discharge Solution
Patient Referral and Placement streamlines the process of discharging patients to other healthcare facilities

CHICAGO, IL
April 6, 2009

Nortel today announced a significant upgrade and enhancement to its Patient Discharge Solution for healthcare providers. The new feature - Patient Referral and Placement - allows hospitals to streamline the process of discharging a patient to another care facility such as a rehabilitation hospital, nursing home or hospice, or obtaining medical equipment for the patient This is an important addition to Nortel's Patient Discharge solution and will help hospitals realize better patient flow management, reduced bed turn over time and increase the number of patients a hospital can treat.

"With our Nortel Healthcare Solutions, we are combining the powerful unified communications technologies that Nortel is famous for with the knowledge we have gained over the years working with Hospitals and healthcare organizations," said Sanjeev Gupta, General Manager of Enterprise Integrated Solutions. "The result is solutions that are specifically designed to work within the clinical environment to enhance patient care, improve clinician productivity and increase patient as well as staff satisfaction, all without sacrificing business results."

Nortel's Patient Discharge Solution was designed with the needs of both hospital staff and patients in mind. The results have been impressive, including savings of up to 4 hours per patient in discharge and bed turn over time. Specifically, the solution saves time and money by employing computer-integrated telephony and IVR technology to automate the entire discharge process from physician consent to prescriptions, housekeeping and the wheelchair ride to the front door. And by Nortel's own estimates, this could mean as much as $11 million in annual revenue increase for a 1,700 patient hospital facility.

"We have a strong relationship with Nortel and have worked with them to develop a solution that truly delivers tangible benefits to our business," said Rick Schooler, VP & CIO ORHS, "The Patient Discharge Solution enables prompt consensus among physicians regarding a patient's discharge while relieving nurses of phone tag, improving hospital bed utilization and allowing patients to return home sooner."

Nortel partnered with Authentidate® to integrate their Inscrybe^TM Healthcare Information Exchange functionality into the existing Nortel Patient Discharge solution. Discharging patients into post acute-care facilities is traditionally a labor and time intensive process for hospitals. Often it requires multiple phone calls and correspondence before a patient can be transferred from one care environment to another. With Patient Referral and Placement, hospitals can increase efficiency and reduce these costs by more than 80%, according to Authentidate research.

"The marriage of Nortel's technology with our solution is a win-win for the healthcare community," said Cecilia Panozzo, Director of Business Development at Authentidate Holding Corp. "Now, hospitals can discharge a patient into a new care facility as easily as if they were sending them home, reducing costs and freeing up beds for new patients more quickly than ever before."

Other Nortel Executive Quotes

"Nortel has nearly 7000 healthcare customers in North America," said Net Payne, VP of Marketing for Nortel's Healthcare Solutions. "Our experience with and knowledge of the healthcare industry allows us to uniquely understand the needs of these companies and develop communications systems that allow them to better utilize existing clinical systems, processes and resources by connecting and coordinating activities, applications and people to drive their business forward."

In addition to the upgraded Patient Discharge Solution, Nortel will also feature other healthcare specific solutions as well as unified communications and networking solutions that hospitals and healthcare providers are using around the world to connect their people, systems and applications together. Stop by the Nortel booth (HiMSS Booth # 4408) to find out more about what we have to offer companies in the healthcare industry.

About Authentidate Holding Corp.
Authentidate Holding Corp. is a worldwide provider of secure Health Information Exchange and workflow management services.  The company's software and web-based services enable healthcare organizations and other enterprises to increase revenues, improve productivity and reduce costs by eliminating paper and manual work steps from clinical, administrative and other processes and enhancing compliance with regulatory requirements. The web-based services are delivered as Software as a Service (Saas) to customers. These solutions incorporate rules-based electronic forms, intelligent routing, transaction management, electronic signatures, identity credentialing, content authentication and automated audit trails. Both web and fax based communications are integrated into automated and trusted workflow solutions.  The company has offices in the United States and Germany. In the United States, Authentidate offers its patent pending content authentication technology in the form of the United States Postal Service® Electronic Postmark® (EPM). For more information, visit the company's website at www.authentidate.com

About Nortel
Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Our next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel's technologies are designed to help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries around the world. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.

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Source: Nortel