Systems Xcellence Partners with ProVantage to Market
Patient Data Warehouse & Decision Support System

Vendor enters reseller agreement to market HX-Eval/HealthMILTON, Ontario (December 14, 1999) -- Systems Xcellence, Inc. (TSE: SXC), announced today an agreement with ProVantage Health Services, Inc. (NYSE: PHS), a leading healthcare knowledge company, to provide its ProVMed® patient data warehousing software as a part of its Healthcare Xcellence (HX) suite of healthcare management software. ProVMed® will be marketed under the name HX-Eval/Health.

HX-Eval/Health is an administrative, financial and clinical decision support system that provides healthcare payers and providers consolidated patient information necessary to make informed decisions about plan management and development factors. The robust data warehouse allows users access to medical and pharmaceutical data as well as national norms that can be used to make enterprise-wide decisions about plan benefit design changes, product pricing and protocol usage. Additional information about sales and marketing, actuarial and claims, medical management, provider profiling and utilization will be integrated into HX-Eval/Health to allow for a total healthcare cost profile.

"HX-Eval/Health provides the full integration of pharmacy, medical and laboratory data, allowing our clients to measure a return on their investment by quantifying healthcare cost savings," said Systems Xcellence President and CEO Gordon Glenn. "This is a product designed to provide access to information over the web in minutes that may have taken days or weeks in the past, increasing efficiency and improving the quality of care."

This agreement follows an existing relationship that began last spring to market ProVantage’s ProVQuery, a pharmaceutical decision support and data warehousing application, under the HX-Eval/Drugâ banner. Through this partnership, SX is able to offer its customers and prospective clients a more comprehensive secure Web-enabled decision support product.

"We are very pleased to expand our relationship with Systems Xcellence," said George Barlow, senior vice president of ProVantage. "ProVantage is a leading, customer-driven, healthcare knowledge company that uses technology, information, and clinical expertise to reduce healthcare costs while improving the quality of care. SX shares these qualities and values with us, and that is what makes this a strategic partnership in the truest sense of the word."

ProVantage is a leading healthcare knowledge company with Health Benefit Management (HBM) and Health Information Technology (HIT) divisions that serve more than 18 million people. Its goal is to be the leading third-party supplier of products and services designed to optimize the quality and minimize the cost of healthcare services. ProVantage provides services to more than 3,500 customers, including pharmacy benefit management services and vision benefit management services.

The health information technology division licenses products that are designed to improve the quality of healthcare. These products are being used by clients in programs covering more than 13 million people. ProVantage's customers include healthcare payers, self-funded employers, third-party health plan administrators, state and federal agencies, union-sponsored benefit plans and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Systems Xcellence is headquartered in Milton, Ontario, and provides advanced online transaction processing solutions for the healthcare benefits management industry. The Company combines robust software products, business expertise and services to deliver superior solutions to the ever-changing managed care sector. The Company's shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol SXC.