PH TECH SELECTS ECESSA FOR POWERLINK WAN LINK CONTROLLERS.

Ecessa, a leader in affordable WAN link controllers for small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME), has announced that healthcare technology provider PH Tech has selected Ecessa's PowerLink WAN link controllers to manage its business-critical WAN infrastructure demands. With PowerLink, health plan providers and doctor offices benefit with improved and reliable network uptime when accessing the PH Tech's online system to obtain applications and review healthcare claims.

PH Tech utilizes a proprietary customer application and service called Clinical Integration Manager (CIM). Doctors, primary care providers and insurance providers use this web-based application to conduct online checks on patient eligibility, authorizations, status on accounts, online medical records management and payment of claims. After deploying PowerLink, the PH Tech network has added redundancy and failover for its T1 and wireless link and can use the same domain name for both connections, providing ease-of-use to users.

"We chose the PowerLink to provide us with network connection redundancy. This gave us automated WAN management through network connection load balancing and failover," states Chad Casady, director of information technology at PH Tech. "Now we have greater network uptime, and I don't have to scramble every time we have a service provider outage. Since we put in the PowerLink, we have had zero network downtime for our users due to ISP connectivity issues. Now, when the wireless connection goes down, users don't even know about it."

"PH Tech needed a solution that would provide them with automatic failover between Internet connections in the event of a service provider outage," states Jason Breyer, vice president of sales at Ecessa. "PowerLink met their business continuity requirements, and offered them an affordable solution for protecting their business from network outages. PowerLink provided them with redundant network connectivity, so that if one service provider has an outage, PowerLink automatically fails over to the other provider. PowerLink also enabled them with greater overall throughput by directing traffic among both their wireless and T1 Internet connections."

With PowerLink, healthcare providers are discovering excellent value in load balancing and failing over for both incoming and outgoing WAN connections. For example, with inbound connections, when doctors, health plan providers, remote employees and partners go to the company's site, and one of the internet service provider network links has an outage, PowerLink becomes the DNS authority, quickly removing the broken network connection's address so that the users only go to working connections. For outbound connections, when employees are working on client accounts, or sending and receiving client files, PowerLink intelligently manages the network by conducting health checks on each network connection to determine networkavailability and performance, and load balances each session to deliver the best user experience.

About Ecessa

Ecessa is a leader in affordable WAN link controllers for WAN and ISP link aggregation, automated load balancing, failover and network security tailored to meet the needs of small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME) that rely on the Internet for e-commerce and business-critical application delivery. Ecessa helps SMEs rapidly grow their business with 24/7 network high-availability, optimized WAN performance, flexible scalability and secure access - while streamlining IT costs. At one-third the cost of other competing products, Ecessa's PowerLink and ShieldLink deliver industry leading price/performance value. Ecessa optimizes WAN traffic for organizations of all types who wish to improve network and application performance and eliminate downtime for business-critical, time-sensitive applications. Ecessa uses multi-homing to connect a single LAN or WAN to multiple ISPs; enables quality-of-service (QoS) to prioritize network traffic that ensures the best possible bandwidth is always available to applications, especially during periods of congestion; and uses link load balancing and automatic failover to direct traffic to WAN links with the optimum bandwidth and cost-efficiencies. Over 6,000 companies rely on Ecessa to cost-effectively ensure that each application has the appropriate Internet bandwidth and availability needed to support user and business requirements. The company is headquartered in Plymouth, MN.

For more information, visit http://www.ecessa.com or call us 800/669-6242.

About PH Tech

PH Tech was established in 1996 with the launch of its Clinical Integration ManagerT (CIM) medical management system to assist providers and payers in the management of managed care rules such as referrals and prior authorizations. In 2000, PH Tech merged with NWTPA, Inc., a third party claims administrator, in order to provide customers with a full array of health care benefits administration services. Today, PH Tech provides these services to over 350,000 people and has grown to over 75 employees. PH Tech offers a variety of third-party administration services to the public side of business, the Oregon Health Plan, as well as to the private sector (commercial services). PH Tech provides comprehensive third-party administration services for Medical, Dental, Vision and Pharmacy plans. PH Tech provides a call center staffed by experience, professional customer service representatives. PH Tech's integrated phone and data systems track and report the types of calls that are being made by our customer's employees and plan members. This tracking allows us to identify areas where communication with the plan members can be clarified. Our Customer Service Representatives have completed education and awareness training for HIPAA security. The PH Tech call center hours are from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm PST. The company is headquartered in Salem, Oregon.

For more information visit http://www.phtech.com, or call us at 800/859-7514.