Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Chooses wired.MD™, Inc. to Provide Online Video Patient Education Solution

Video Patient Education Software made available to Access PA participant libraries and their patrons to better educate them on major health conditions

wired.MD, Inc. announced today that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has chosen wired.MD to provide video patient education services to Access Pennsylvania Database and POWER Library participants throughout the state of Pennsylvania. wired.MD will provide Access PA/POWER Library participants with access to over 200 online patient education video topics that cover many common health conditions, including diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, and cancer screenings. Access PA/POWER Library users can access these informative videos on computers from any Access PA/POWER Library location or from home on their personal computer through the POWER Library link on their local public library’s web site.

Clinical research has shown that individuals who watch a patient education video are up to sixteen times more likely to remember that information than if they had only received a text handout of the same information. Better educated health information consumers have been shown to maintain a healthier life style. This new service will allow Access PA to provide the highest quality health information available to their participant organizations and their patrons.

"HSLC is excited to add the wired.MD Health Video Database to the current offerings for Access PA,” commented Joseph C. Scorza, Executive Director of HSLC, managers of the Access PA Database. “We believe this information will be a valuable resource for the people of Pennsylvania that will help them better understand and be better educated about their health."

As part of the license agreement, HSLC will catalog all the videos, creating MaRC records which can then be loaded into the Access PA Database and retrieved through standard searches. Each record will contain multiple links directly to the videos, which are currently available via the web in high and low bandwith versions of four different video formats. The software to view the videos is available for free on the Internet or is already included with home and library computers.

Mark Friess, CEO of wired.MD, commented, "We believe this partnership will offer great value to the people of Pennsylvania in their efforts to better understand what they need to know about their health. Online video patient education, combined with Access PA’s current offerings, will be a great educational tool for the Access PA/POWER Library participant libraries and their patrons, whether that information is accessed in the state’s libraries or from the patron’s home.”

About wired.MD, Incorporated

wired.MD, Inc. was founded in Portland, Oregon in March 2000. The company's mission is to empower healthcare professionals to improve patients' healthcare experience and reduce costs by making patient education more engaging, effective, and efficient to deliver. wired.MD is located at 317 S.W. Alder Street, Third Floor, Portland, Oregon, 97204, and can be contacted at (503) 889-0010, info@wired.md, or www.wired.md

About HSLC and the Access PA Database

HSLC is a multi-type library consortium founded in 1988 by the medical schools in Pennsylvania. Since January 2000, HSLC has served as the manager of the Access Pennsylvania Database. The Access Pennsylvania Database, a project of the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, was started in 1985 as a way to provide a union catalog across the State of Pennsylvania. It was the first and remains the largest statewide union catalog that includes the holdings of all types of libraries. The Access PA Database today represents a coordinated effort to facilitate resource sharing among libraries throughout the Commonwealth via the World Wide Web. As of September 16, 2003, 2797 School, Public, Academic and Special libraries have their holdings listed in the Access PA Database. The Database contains approximately 6.6 million titles and 44.5 million items.