[July 31, 2018]

Mammosphere, a Powerful Patient Engagement Tool, Enables Health Care Payers and Employers to Support Breast Health

Mammosphere today introduces a powerful new tool to enable insurance payers and employers to improve breast health care for their members and employees. The Mammosphere digital platform makes a woman's complete breast health history, including prior mammogram images, securely accessible anywhere, anytime to share with her care team. Most importantly, Mammosphere empowers women to play an active role in their breast health.

"Using Mammosphere, women become partners with their doctors and radiologists," said Dr. Kathryn Pearson Peyton, a breast-imaging radiologist who founded the company and serves as chair of its Women's Health Advisory Committee. "They can share their entire breast health history with their care team no matter the location. Having a more complete patient picture will help improve diagnosis and enable earlier treatment, if necessary. This can significantly improve clinical outcomes."

Mammosphere is a part of lifeIMAGE, a Massachusetts-based clinical information network that connects more than 1,400 hospitals with 150,000 providers in the United States and 58,000 clinics globally. The company orchestrates the sharing and collaboration of the most technically complex medical data, including diagnostic images.

The need for Mammosphere is driven in part by increasingly mobile lifestyles. As people move, change jobs, and switch health plans more frequently, a care team may not have a patient's prior mammograms available for review. This can increase the rate of false-positive diagnoses from a new screening exam by 260 percent, leading to unnecessary orders of additional expensive diagnostic tests and biopsies. Women also experience needless anxiety.

About 60 million women in the U.S. undergo regular mammography screening, and one quarter of these women do not have prior exam images available at the time of their mammogram screening. This leads to hundreds of thousands of false-positive results and more than $4 billion spent annually in the U.S. on over-diagnosis of breast cancer.

Mammosphere eliminates this unnecessary burden with a secure, cloud-based platform from which patients and their physicians can access complete breast health history, including images from prior mammograms. Clinical studies have shown that having this information available reduces false positive diagnosis of brest cancer by 40 to 60 percent while enabling physicians to detect one-quarter of actual cancers sooner than they otherwise would have. Simply put, diagnosis is more accurate when doctors have a patient's prior images available for comparison.

Mammosphere's digital platform is currently supporting a major, multi-year study of breast cancer screening protocols.

For health care payers including insurance companies, Mammosphere offers numerous benefits such as:

• Reduced medical spend by eliminating false-positive diagnoses and subsequent expenses
• Improved clinical outcomes
• Improved member loyalty

Employers also see benefits, including:

• Improved employee productivity
• Employee engagement with their own health care
• Employee satisfaction boosted by access to a unique benefit

Matthew A. Michela, president and CEO of lifeIMAGE, said, "We are helping to move breast health care into the 21^st century. By promoting strong engagement with their members and employees, Mammosphere enables payers and employers to differentiate themselves from competitors. Payers will see lower medical spend, and employers will see improved productivity and employee satisfaction."

About MAMMOSPHERE

Mammosphere is a patient engagement platform that empowers women to take control of their breast health. It allows patients to store all their breast health information and mammograms in one secure, online location. This saves the patient time, money and unnecessary stress while allowing physicians easy access to critical clinical information. Mammosphere is powered by lifeIMAGE, the leading medical information network in the country. Learn more at mammosphere.com.

About lifeIMAGE

lifeIMAGE is a medical information network connecting health care networks, providers and patients to clinical information including imaging records. lifeIMAGE enables access to information for more than 150,000 providers, a variety of care coordination organizations, and 1,400 facilities across clinical specialties and institutions globally. Providers use lifeIMAGE to improve the quality and timeliness of care, expand referral business and eliminate wasteful spending. For more information about lifeIMAGE, please visit lifeimage.com, check out our blog or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180731005155/en/

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