SYSTEMS

Demonstrating its ongoing commitment to promoting equal access to quality healthcare, Sun Microsystems, the creator and leading advocate of Java technology, will showcase its solutions at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) 2005 Blue Health IT Symposium, being held November 3rd in Orlando, Florida. Sponsored by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the 2005 Health IT Symposium will focus on strategic health informatics through integration of administrative and clinical data, including internal systems and workflows, national and regional interoperability, quality and performance analytics, enterprise architecture and related areas. Sun's participation in the BCBSA 2005 Health IT Symposium underscores its commitment to the sharing of information technology to power health information networks and help bridge the healthcare digital divide through advanced integration and composite applications. With technologies such as the Sun Java Integration Suite and Solaris 10 Operating System, Sun offers a powerful platform for developing, deploying and managing composite applications based on a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Interoperability across healthcare organizations is a cornerstone of healthcare delivery in the 21st Century, and must be addressed through the collaborative sharing of information both inside and outside the enterprise. Specifically, organizations providing healthcare coverage must also strive to offer increased service and support to their members while controlling escalating operational costs. Sun has demonstrated success in working with healthcare plans across the globe and currently provides healthcare solutions to many Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA), Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, Capital Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Blue Shield of California. For example, BCBSMA, the largest health insurer in New England, chose to reengineer its infrastructure by introducing an SOA based on the Java Integration Suite, the newest addition to the Sun Java Enterprise System as a result of the recent acquisition of SeeBeyond. This new infrastructure provided BCBSMA with seamless, service-based integration to its back-office applications, and has enabled the expansion of end user channels, such as self-service Web access. The new architecture has also simplified the process for integrating partners, thereby reducing the cost to offer new services to customers. BCBSMA was one of the first organizations within the industry to understand that quality of service demands a real-time transactional infrastructure. The company is now recognized as a leading player in the healthcare industry, in part because it has built its information infrastructure upon a solution from one of the leading players in the web infrastructure, identity management and integration spaces.