Leading Healthcare Organizations Substantiate Link Between
            Business Success and Data Warehouse RDBMS Performance

    DCI DATA WAREHOUSE CONFERENCE, ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 25 /PRNewswire/ --Red
Brick(R) Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: REDB), The Data Warehouse Company(TM), today
said its successful data warehouse customers in the healthcare industry affirm
that database performance is the most critical factor for success in data
warehousing and through their own evaluations have concluded that Red Brick is
the data warehouse database performance leader.
    Red Brick maintains that one of the most consistent conclusions of
successful data warehouse users is the irrefutable link they make between
database performance and their organizations' ability to maximize quantifiable
business benefits from their data warehouse applications.
    Healthcare organizations require detailed information about patients,
services, insurance and treatments in order to remain competitive.  With the
advent of HMOs and other managed care groups, this information becomes even
more valuable as healthcare organizations compete to minimize costs while
maximizing service and benefits to patients.  Their data warehouse projects
must be able to support large data sets (patient information) while allowing
large numbers of users to access the information concurrently.  Red Brick's
relational database (RDBMS) designed specifically for data warehousing is
strategic to the performance of these organizations' data warehouse
applications and the business benefits they derive from them.
    "We've seen significant growth in our healthcare customer base which we
believe is a reflection of the confidence this industry has in our
understanding of healthcare data warehouse requirements," said Chris Erickson,
president and CEO of Red Brick.  "Our exclusive focus on data warehousing
enables us to provide the specialized products and expertise necessary to help
make our healthcare customers successful."
    (See separate announcement about Red Brick's "Performance is
Everything(TM)" initiative announced today.)    A partial list of Red Brick
data warehouse customers in healthcare includes:  Argus Health Systems, Blue
Cross Blue Shield Association, Healthsource, Liberty Health, National Data
Corporation, Pharmacy Data Management, Radiology Management Sciences, The
Hospital for Sick Children, Tufts Health Plans, United Medical Resources,
University of Minnesota Hospital and Welborn Clinic.
    Red Brick recently became an IT partner in the Affiliated Health
Information Networks of New England, a project convened by the Massachusetts
Health Data Consortium.  The Affiliated Networks project includes
20 healthcare organizations --ten health plans, eight hospital systems and two
other provider networks-- which represent more than 3.5 million covered lives
and a combined information technology budget of $1 billion.  The project was
created to facilitate the development of a regional comprehensive health data
system.
    This system will provide a "virtual" health data repository from which
participants can research, analyze, transmit and track health data, enabling
them to gain better insights into trends and treatments.  Red Brick has been
recognized as a leader in data warehouse technology by chief information
officers (CIOs) from the 20 healthcare organizations within the Affiliated
Networks project.  These CIOs feel that Red Brick will provide the project
with valuable knowledge and expertise in healthcare-specific data
warehouse technology.

    Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
    Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA), a health insurance
provider for the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), uses Red
Brick Warehouse for its Federal Employee Program data warehouse.  BCBSA is
addressing a growing need for information and knowledge management to stay
competitive, reduce costs and improve program administration.  Red Brick
Warehouse provides the flexibility for a powerful, very fast data warehouse,
giving users the ability to manage and query detail data quickly and
efficiently.  The Red Brick-based data warehouse will provide information
management and analysis on approximately 1.8 million contracts representing
more than three million insured lives, and is expected to reach one terabyte
in size of historical data.
    "We found Red Brick superior in speed of loading, a critical requirement
for us, and in processing complex queries across large volumes of data," said
Ray Pyle, managing director and CIO at BCBSA.  "Red Brick's support of star
schema, bit-mapped indexing and parallel queries makes it scream when dealing
with the large volumes of data we analyze."

    Healthsource
    Healthsource is a $1.8 billion health maintenance organization and third
party administrator headquartered in New Hampshire.  Healthsource uses several
Red Brick data warehouses, each optimally designed to measure a particular
aspect of its business.  For example, the largest Red Brick database stores
several years of medical claims history and is used to measure clinical
trends, treatment patterns and financial expenditures, as well as medical
quality and preventive health profiles.
    "The speed with which we measure our business and respond to questions is
critical in the competitive healthcare industry," said Bob Chin, CIO at
Healthsource.  "We depend on our ability to provide quick answers to our
providers and members, and to seize rapidly changing market opportunities,
such as responding to physicians and hospitals on pharmaceutical usage and
benefits.  Red Brick's performance enables significantly more throughput which
gives our analysts the power to get more done in less time."
    Healthsource's $3 million decision support system has paid for itself many
times over since its inception less than three years ago, according to Chin.

    The Hospital for Sick Children
    The Hospital for Sick Children, a healthcare, teaching and research center
dedicated exclusively to children and affiliated with the University of
Toronto, is a leader in tertiary and quaternary pediatric care and one of the
largest medical research institutions in North America.  "Sick Kids," as the
institution is known with affection throughout the world, uses a Red Brick
data warehouse for hospital management tasks and for clinical research.
    "We need fast access to administrative information in order to react to
changes in patient volumes and other hospital activities," said Daniel Guerin,
director of Information Services at The Hospital for Sick Children.  "We
also need to consolidate and efficiently retrieve and analyze clinical data to
support clinical research and the development of knowledge-based medicine.  To
meet these needs, we chose Red Brick Warehouse."

    Tufts Health Plans
    Tufts Health Plans is an award-winning billion-dollar Massachusetts-based
HMO that has doubled its membership in three years.  The HMO contracts with
hospitals, physicians and medical centers.  Tufts relies on its data warehouse
to make informed business decisions on its data for cost benefit analysis,
HEDIS reporting requirements, and clinical business management.
    "Today, information is the life blood of healthcare," said Rick Shoup,
Ph.D., senior vice president and CIO at Tufts.  "Our customers want to have
their universe of information --about their members and about costs-- at their
fingertips and on their desktops.  With Red Brick, we're able to give it to
them.  Red Brick has been a strategic part of our data warehouse projects,
enabling us to allow more direct user access to data, while delivering a much
higher level of performance in reporting and analysis."

    About Red Brick Systems, Inc.
    Red Brick Systems, Inc., based in Los Gatos, Calif., is the industry's
fastest growing database company and the leading provider of high-performance
relational database products for data warehousing.  Its flagship product, Red
Brick Warehouse 5.0, is the world's fastest and most scalable relational
database for data warehousing, including data marts, online analytical
processing (OLAP) and data mining.  Red Brick customers are successful because
the company's high-performance products and service enable more users to
analyze more data and make better decisions faster.
    Information about Red Brick is available on the World Wide Web at
http://www.redbrick.com.  News releases and corporate background information
may also be retrieved by fax. For an index of available materials, please call
800-758-5804, and enter PIN #105756.
    Red Brick and the Red Brick logo are registered trademarks, and The Data
Warehouse Company and Performance is Everything are trademarks of Red
Brick Systems, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the
property of their respective holders.

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