ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND, January 23, 2002 — DrFirst.com, Inc. and MedStar Health announced today an agreement for DrFirst to offer products and services to MedStar’s community of physicians and healthcare facilities. Under this agreement, DrFirst will first implement its Rcopia Network, which includes electronic prescribing, charge capture and secure messaging for physicians in a community-wide, integrated network that links to existing hospital information systems, at beta sites within MedStar Health.

MedStar Health is one of the nation’s largest healthcare systems, with seven hospitals serving the Baltimore, MD-Washington, DC area. The initial phase of the project is to implement the electronic prescribing functionality of the Rcopia Network at the Georgetown University Student Primary Care Clinic and at MedStar Physician Partners at Union Memorial Hospital. MedStar Health selected DrFirst after extensive evaluation of PDA application vendors.

“MedStar Health is pleased to offer its physicians an intuitive and robust e-prescribing solution. We were particularly impressed with DrFirst’s innovations with respect to security and connectivity,” said Dr. Peter Basch, Medical Director of e-Health Initiatives at MedStar. “We are committed to reducing errors in prescribing medications. By implementing Rcopia in these sites, we are taking positive steps to address the Institute of Medicine’s report focusing on preventable medical errors.”

DrFirst’s electronic prescription management system allows physicians to print, fax, or e-mail any prescription. The technology and functionality of Rcopia make the application ideal both for individual physician practices and as part of an enterprise system for larger healthcare organizations. One feature is RcopiaLink, which creates an interface to transfer patient demographic data between Rcopia and practice management systems that communicate via HL-7 standards. This eliminates the time consuming and error-prone task of entering patient demographic information into both the prescribing system and the practice management system.
An additional enhancement, RcopiaSync, allows physicians to create prescriptions any time, anywhere, on any desktop, laptop, wireless PC, or PDA. RcopiaSync allows physicians to write prescriptions offline on handheld devices and electronically send encrypted prescriptions through the Internet with any cradle device or infrared (IR) port attached to a PC. This provides true flexibility for physicians to use Rcopia at the point of care-office, hospital, or home. Since the platform for Rcopia is DrFirst’s Secure Messaging Exchange, all transactions are completed with top-level security.

“We are looking forward to deploying our Rcopia Network to MedStar,” said James F. Chen, Chairman and CEO of DrFirst. “This represents a tremendous opportunity for us to showcase our technology to physicians in the largest healthcare organization in this region.”

For further information:

DrFirst
sales@drfirst.com
Tel: (301) 231-9510
Fax: (301) 231-9512
www.drfirst.com