FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Shara Cohen
415-378-1633
shara@elmexchange.com

JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL SELECTS ELM EXCHANGE
TO EDUCATE RESIDENTS ABOUT MEDICAL LIABILITY
Online curriculum provides legal education to doctors
to reduce frequency and severity of claims

Rockville, MD - April 7, 2003 - ELM (Education in Legal Medicine) Exchange, the leading provider of Internet-based risk management education for the healthcare industry, today announced that The Johns Hopkins Hospital has selected ELM to provide the hospital's resident staff with online training related to expectations of their professional conduct.

The ELM course, customized to the needs and specifications of the Johns Hopkins staff, has been in use for over a month and will be released to the entire resident staff over a one-year period. It covers a range of topics that include Consent, Standards of Care and Records & Disclosure. By delivering this content over the Internet, residents are given an opportunity to learn at their convenience and at their own pace, while hospital administration can track and verify participation through progress testing in real time.

"Most physicians today are not aware of the expectations of healthcare providers as they are conveyed through the law," according to Sal Fiscina, MD, JD, and ELM's founder. "Our courses are designed to introduce healthcare providers to the legal principles associated with those expectations and instill confidence in clinical decision making. To be able to educate the resident staff in the early stages of their training represents an important effort on the part of Johns Hopkins."

The costs associated with medical malpractice are staggering. For the federal government, the direct costs of medical liability coverage and the indirect costs of defensive medicine can add up to as much as $47.5 billion for the federal government, each and every year. ELM courseware covers a wide range of critical content to enable physicians to practice better, more confident medicine.

The ELM curriculum is case based and uses real-life medical situations and legal claims to address fundamental legal principles as well as specialty specific concerns. ELM courses offers sophisticated content, progress testing, targeted feedback, and real-time reporting to raise the level of education for physicians and healthcare professionals. The design of ELM's courses, and their online delivery, has been developed to meet the specific needs of both program administrators and the health care provider.

ELM works with some of the top medical facilities in the country, including New York Presbyterian, Westchester Medical Center, and the SUNY system.

About Education in Legal Medicine
For more than 15 years, Education in Legal Medicine (ELM) has provided a unified curriculum for health care providers aimed at lowering the risk of compensable harm to patients. Successfully completed by over 25,000 providers in every medical specialty, ELM coursework is a proven, substantive curriculum that provides administrators with a solution to address risk and liability within their organizations. The ELM curriculum provides health care providers with a CME alternative not bound by geographic or time constraints.