Nortel Upgrades Patient Discharge Solution with Referral and Placement Capabilities

Streamlines Process of Discharging Patients to other Healthcare Facilities

CHICAGO - Nortel* [TSX: NT | OTC: NRTLQ] announced a significant upgrade 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, and to obtain medical equipment for the patient. This addition to Nortel’s Patient Discharge Solution can help hospitals realize better patient flow management, reduced bed turn over time and increase the number of patients they can treat.

“Our Healthcare Solutions use powerful unified communications technologies to accelerate and automate the clinical processes,” said Sanjeev Gupta, general manager, Healthcare Solutions, Nortel. “The results are solutions that are specifically designed to work within the clinical environment to enhance business results through faster patient discharge, better patient care, improved clinician/equipment productivity and increased patient/staff satisfaction.”

In one customer example, Orlando Health , a Nortel solution yielded savings of up to four hours per patient in discharge and bed turn over time. The solution employs computer-integrated telephony and IVR technology to automate the entire discharge process - from physician consent, to prescriptions, to housekeeping and the wheelchair ride to the front door. Nortel projects that by using the Patient Discharge Solution, one 1,700 bed hospital can achieve a better than $10 million revenue increase in the first full year of implementation.

“We have worked closely with Nortel to develop a solution that truly delivers tangible benefits to our business,” said Rick Schooler, vice president and chief information officer, Orlando Health. “The Patient Discharge Solution enables prompt approvals from physicians regarding a patient’s discharge status, which relieves nurses from playing phone tag. It also helps us to promptly initiate multiple departmental activities that enable a more timely discharge, thus helping to reduce costs at the end of the patient stay and improve bed utilization. Patients return home sooner, and we’re more efficient.”

Nortel teamed with Authentidate® Inscrybe™ Healthcare ** to integrate Inscrybe’s 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 Inscrybe Authentidate research.

“The marriage of Nortel’s technology with our solution is a win-win for the healthcare community,” said Cecilia Panozzo, director, Business Development, Authentidate Holding Corporation, parent company of Inscrybe Healthcare. “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.”

Nortel has nearly 7000 healthcare customers in North America. To learn more, visit the company’s booth #4408 at HIMSS09 ** in Chicago April 5-8. In addition to the upgraded Patient Discharge Solution, Nortel will also feature other healthcare-specific products, 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.

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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