AUCKLAND, February  2004 – Healix, a leading-edge health software application developer and Idiom Software, suppliers of business rules software, are pleased to announce that Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) will be incorporating the IDIOM Decision Manager to support its Enterprise Data Warehousing and Costing initiatives.

Healix is a joint venture between leading computer services company RHE Associates Ltd and HealthMAP Ltd, specialists in project and process management in the health sector established to create and distribute specialist healthcare applications globally.

When CDHB were looking for a rules engine to supplement their data warehousing and costing engine, they turned to Idiom and Healix because of their product alignment and sector experience.   Says Keith Young, Decision Support Manager at CDHB: “One of the fundamental reasons for choosing the Idiom rules engine was that it is also used by the supplier of our costing engine.  This will allow us to develop skills in the use of a single product that has application across the complete data warehouse and its supporting tool set.”

“Idiom enables us to apply the same rules to data obtained from disparate operational systems in a common manner.  This will give us confidence that the values obtained are consistent and reliable,” reports Keith Young.   

“We believe that the Idiom rules engine has the potential for broader application in the health sector and within our own operations,” says Faye Logan, Business Development Manager at CDHB. “We look forward to investigating how to work with Healix and Idiom on other projects to maximize its value.”

Matt Hector Taylor, director of Healix, says, “We have developed a good understanding of health sector process and policy over the past eight years and have been looking for technology that can help us manage the complexity of health care delivery and management for our clients. We believe the Idiom rules engine is the ideal solution for any health sector organization needing to manage information from multiple systems or deal with frequent changes to policy, contract or process. This project will deliver huge benefits to CDHB in improved costing information, reliability of data, transparency of decision logic and simplified maintenance.  Other District Health Boards have asked to explore the relevance of this technology to their own operations. We believe that Healix and IDIOM can do a great deal to make health information work for the sector.”

For further information, please contact:

Mark Norton, Idiom, 377 7486, mark.norton@idiomsoftware.com

Matt Hector Taylor, Healix, 377 8341, matt.hector-taylor@healixsolutions.com

-ENDS-

About Idiom

Designed for a world market, the Idiom Decision Suite is XML-based to provide technology independence and flexibility. It provides a simple GUI environment for the direct capture of business decisions and their underlying rules from expert end users. Idiom produces English language documentation of decisions and rules for its human audience, and source code for the computers. It is therefore easy to understand and verify whilst being extremely efficient in execution.

Idiom is also a powerful tool for software developers, systems integrators and OEMs, who can embed Idiom in their architecture or applications to produce flexible, highly configurable solutions for their customers.

Idiom’s customers include Allianz, IAG, and Power Solutions DTD.  While business rules software has near universal applicability, early adopters have been in the insurance, health, and financial services industries which are all ideal markets for Idiom.  These industries are highly competitive and must respond to ongoing regulatory and market pressures.  IDIOM believes that most of the changes that they need to make to their systems in response to these pressures are actually business rule changes driven by changes in strategy or market conditions. With Idiom, the business decisions and rules are decoupled from the underlying applications and infrastructure. That means rule changes can be quickly and inexpensively implemented, without changes to the underlying applications.