Orchard Software Press Release: For Immediate Release

Re: Orchard Software is proud to introduce a new enterprise-class LIS—Orchard® Sequoia™—built on completely new technology to aid laboratories in their positive impact on healthcare informatics, diagnostics, and patient outcomes.

The majority of LISs in use today are built on older technology, most more than 30 years old. The release of Orchard Sequoia is truly newsworthy because the technological advances that have taken place since a new LIS was developed from the ground up are astounding and our overall healthcare goals have shifted. Rather than continuing to patch changes onto an older technology, Sequoia is being developed right from the start using the foundation of Orchard Software’s vast industry knowledge, experience, and expertise regarding the future direction of the diagnostics industry. This means that Sequoia will be the first new LIS built with today’s and tomorrow’s healthcare needs in mind.

“With Orchard® Harvest™, Orchard® Pathology, Orchard® Copia®, and Orchard® Trellis™, we have a strong suite of products and are recognized as leaders in the industry with the most decorated software package of the last decade. We’d like to introduce the newest edition to our product line—Orchard Sequoia— that will allow our product suite to meet the comprehensive needs of the laboratory, including the largest organizations and laboratories in the country,” says Curt Johnson, Chief Operating Officer at Orchard Software.

“We are taking 20 years of knowledge that we’ve gained in the laboratory industry, combined with the latest technology developments, and are producing a new LIS designed to be scalable and to address the needs of the largest clients. We know that the new healthcare arena requires that your diagnostic system be part of a larger system and that the totality of the solution includes integrating your diagnostic system into the entire network. With Sequoia’s unique architecture, using application programming interface (API) and web services to allow other systems access into lab data as well as the lab access to data in other healthcare networks, this provides a clear advantage. As organizations start to wrap their minds around how they can use data in a more global way and begin to integrate big data, we’re here to help; in fact, we’re here to start it,” says Rob Bush, President of Orchard.

Mr. Bush continues, “Integrated diagnostic information provided by the laboratory is vital to facilitate diagnostic analytics necessary for the development of treatment pathways that can improve healthcare efficiency, control waste, reduce costs, and improve patient care. As healthcare focuses on overall population health, laboratory data is an integral part of the required clinical information. With Sequoia, users can extract and manipulate data stored in the LIS to generate statistics for analytics using data trends and patterns to provide valuable insight; and use predictive analysis to support the growth and development of their laboratory by creating reports that analyze historical data to impact future decisions.”

Orchard Sequoia provides maximum scalability to accommodate the needs of high volume laboratories and support laboratory growth concurrent with the fast-paced changes taking place in healthcare—incorporating much-desired tools to measure performance, improve productivity and efficiency, and generate valuable business analytics. The development of Orchard Sequoia is focused on the patient-centric, extremely efficient and flexible laboratory, providing laboratories with the specialized tools they need to be more involved in supporting positive patient outcomes and saving healthcare dollars.

“Our healthcare system is seeing incredible advances in molecular and genetic testing that require advanced algorithms, interpretations, and big data technology that older LIS technology cannot handle. Sequoia’s fresh, innovative, and leading-edge development allows us to take advantage of all the latest and newest technologies, methodologies, platforms, and architecture for software design, informatics, and interoperability—culminating in the next wave of LIS of the utmost scalability and versatility,” says Mr. Johnson. “Orchard Sequoia has the tools to measure performance, improve productivity and efficiency, and generate valuable business analytics. Orchard Sequoia’s segmental tiered architecture, structured data framework, rich internet platform, and superior connectivity capabilities are what the leaders in healthcare need to generate and deliver the new currency of healthcare—supporting the front-end of patient-centered care and quality outcomes, while reducing cost,” concludes Henry Oglesby, Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Orchard Software.

The maximum scalability available in Orchard Sequoia’s three-tier design accommodates the needs of high volume laboratories across multiple locations and departments, including clinical, microbiology, molecular, and anatomic pathology. Orchard Sequoia brings many benefits:• The three-tier architecture allows for independent update of a segment of the application without affecting other segments or restarting the entire application, generating superior performance in high volume environments. • Orchard Sequoia utilizes a Microsoft® SQL® Server 2012 Enterprise Edition database to provide the high volume, high velocity solution, and expanding data that is required by the ever-changing laboratory. Orchard Sequoia data can be mined using SQL Reporting Services or Crystal Reports without exposing the Sequoia production database.• Within Sequoia, Orchard has partnered with Mirth™ to provide an HL7 interface engine that supports HL7 standards and ensures continuous connectivity to address the evolving HL7 environment. The open source nature of Mirth™ Connect provides Sequoia users with the opportunity to implement and manage their own EHR interfaces with additional Mirth™ training. • On a real-time basis, Sequoia can track key performance indicators that support future business decisions and contribute to consistent and superior service for providers and patients. Orchard Sequoia provides valuable business and laboratory analytics, including constructive insight into laboratory costs, volumes, provider ordering patterns, and continuous quality improvement efforts to direct administrative decisions. Performance analytics from Sequoia’s data collation can help evaluate progress toward strategic goals as well as supplement EHR systems that may have limited capability for compiling laboratory analytics.• With Sequoia, users can extract and manipulate data stored in the LIS to generate statistics for analytics using data trends and patterns to provide insight into population health status and other laboratory business intelligence needs. Ad-hoc reports can track turnaround times, physician utilization, testing volumes, staffing levels by shift, billing data, population data by diagnosis, and more. Orchard Sequoia can be used to monitor data by analyte to discover shifts between reagent lot numbers, identify unnecessary or duplicate testing scenarios, or track specific diagnoses or abnormal test results to manage disease populations.• Orchard Sequoia includes extensive flexible, rules-based, decision-making support technology that improves workflow efficiency and reduces errors. Using advanced configurable rules to aid decision making throughout the total testing process, Sequoia enables a patient-centered approach to rule design and implementation, from ordering to reporting to billing, to ensure that accurate decisions are made.• Orchard Sequoia offers a multitude of helpful ways to monitor and support analyzer interface processes, including maintenance reminders and documentation, interface transmission tracking, load lists creation, and a live dashboard to monitor interface statuses. • Sample tracking features in Sequoia organize and track the storage of laboratory samples and specimens to facilitate quicker, easier retrieval. At order entry, the collected samples are directly associated with the order, integrating sample tracking into your system and automatically creating a complete sample audit trail.• In Sequoia, patient records are electronically filed, easily accessible, and readily available to view, print, fax, email, or web-deliver. The automated document-linking interface eliminates the process of manually linking documents or images (e.g., photographs, assay sheets, requisitions, ABNs, insurance cards, etc.) to patients, orders, or QC graphs, and allows you to add descriptive text to appear on the report. • Orchard Sequoia has highly configurable advanced security options embedded throughout the software. System administrators can track user actions, regulate password security setup, and control access to specified areas within the system. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) technology secures the application within the facility and provides IT staff with easy maintenance of security levels and passwords. • SQL Server AlwaysOn technology offers proven solutions for high availability and disaster recovery. The SQL AlwaysOn architecture combined with Windows Failover Clustering provides a solution to support read-only local replicas and remote hosted Disaster Recovery sites to ensure high availability of the Sequoia database. With the general availability of SQL Server 2012, Sequoia will support Microsoft’s In-Memory Technology, which allows optimized tables to reside in memory for read and write activities without relying upon disk reads and writes. This optimization can generate performance improvements of up to 20 times over standard memory architecture SQL databases.• Orchard Sequoia’s deployment model has a “Big Data” component that allows for mining and evaluation of large quantities of unstructured data. This “Big Data” solution will permit the long-term storage of large informational stores that can be mined, examined, and evaluated. • Orchard Sequoia provides a rich user interface environment that will follow in Orchard’s tradition of giving the end user the tools needed to mine their own data via multiple paths to access the information they need to evaluate. The user will be able to create electronic, paper, and graphic reports from within the Sequoia information dashboard.• The 2012 SQL Server environment allows a user to perform custom data queries using a combination of SQL Reporting Services (SRS) and a secondary copy of the Sequoia SQL data file. They can also utilize Sequoia data to populate a SQL Data warehouse to allow the coordination of information from multiple sources, giving data analysts access to information across all information systems.• The Sequoia LIS monitors a dynamic log of changes made to database records so that system changes are logged and information from a single or group of records can be restored to any earlier state. Mr. Johnson concludes, “Orchard’s goal is to focus on the laboratory and provide state-of-the-art LIS technology to support the lab’s role in the healthcare arena. Our lab information systems offer the flexibility, decision support, business intelligence, analytics, and diagnostic data necessary to sustain and foster improvements in a rapidly changing healthcare environment.”

About OrchardOrchard Software Corporation (Carmel, IN), founded in 1993, is a leader in the laboratory information system industry and offers a variety of lab system solutions. Orchard’s products are installed in all sizes of multi-site and multi-specialty physician groups and clinics, hospitals, independent reference labs, student health centers, veterinary labs, and public health organizations. Orchard’s best-of-breed systems provide rules-based decision support, ICD screening, data mining for analytics, and seamless integration to support point-of-care, clinical, microbiology, molecular, cytology, and anatomic pathology testing. Orchard also offers a laboratory outreach solution for EHR connectivity and remote access. Orchard serves more than 1,300 laboratories across the country helping them improve efficiency, reduce errors, and enhance integration. For additional information about Orchard’s laboratory information systems, please visit www.orchardsoft.com. For additional information regarding Orchard Software, visit www.orchardsoft.com, or contact Kerry Foster at (800) 856-1948 or via email at [email protected].

Enclosed Graphics: Orchard logo Orchard Sequoia logoSequoia Architecture Diagram

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