BURLINGTON, MA, August 14, 2002—Cognos (Nasdaq:COGN; TSX:CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI), today announced that Cognos business intelligence is at work in some of the world's largest and most innovative healthcare organizations. Among the many healthcare organizations worldwide using Cognos are Aspect Medical Systems; a pioneer and global leader in brain monitoring; COBE Cardiovascular, a world leader involved in delivering therapeutic solutions in the treatment of cardiovascular disease; and one of the leading medical groups in the Midwest, Advocate Medical Group.

Cognos provides the healthcare industry's most complete, enterprise-scale BI solution. With its integrated components, underlying framework, flexible information delivery, and event-driven business intelligence capabilities within Cognos Series 7, Cognos helps deliver a proven advantage in improving and better managing a company's business performance. Cognos' solutions, designed to help healthcare organizations drive efficiency across their enterprises, allow users to closely track research project lifecycles, customer service, distribution, and supply chain issues, and overall financial performance.

Leading healthcare organizations using Cognos to drive competitive advantage include:

Aspect Medical Systems: Aspect Medical (NASDAQ: ASPM) is recognized as a pioneer and global market leader in brain monitoring, having led the way in developing proprietary technologies that directly measure these effects and ultimately improve the quality and cost effectiveness of patient care. Before implementing Cognos DecisionStream, critical data was stored on different servers or in several Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. Each report quantified key metrics such as shipments in a different way, resulting in different answers to important questions depending on the report used.

"We needed to consolidate our data in one place and validate and report on it using a uniform corporate reporting tool," explains George Papamitrou, director of Information Services, Aspect Medical Systems. "Using Cognos to unite disparate data sources across the organization, including complaint, financial and manufacturing databases as well as a Siebel CRM application, we have created a consistent and unified data infrastructure that allows us to see across all operations and improve our decision-making process."

COBE Cardiovascular: As one of the world's leading companies involved in delivering therapeutic solutions in the treatment of cardiovascular disease, COBE Cardiovascular needed a solution that would help maintain high customer service levels while providing the ability to analyze sales trends. The solution, one in a suite of SSA Global Technologies, Inc.™ (SSA GT™) BPCS Enterprise Performance Analytics (EPA) applications, powered by Cognos Analytic Applications, allows COBE to gain timely, comprehensive insight into customer buying behavior and sales performance trends across the enterprise.

"Cognos Analytic Applications gives our sales force real-time interaction with information, allowing them to accurately anticipate the needs of our customers. The sales staff has access to current sales information within hours instead of waiting days and weeks for reports to be generated," said Marsha Williams, vice president of Information Technology, COBE Cardiovascular. "Because Cognos and SSA Global Technologies partnered to pre-build this solution specifically for the industrial sector, we were able to cut deployment time from a planned five months to a mere eight weeks. In fact, within a two-week period, we had populated the warehouse and begun analyzing data."

"The Cognos Analytic Applications solution doubles as a customer relationship management solution for our sales force," continued Williams. "Our users are able to quickly analyze, view, and record data and trends about a specific customer prior to contacting that customer. We were confident that Cognos Analytic Applications would provide our sales team with high-level, overview data, but we did not anticipate that the solution would satisfy our CRM requirements as well."

Advocate Medical Group: Advocate Medical Group, one of the leading medical groups in the Midwest, wanted to provide its executives, physicians, and managers with robust tools to access critical, enterprise-wide data. Advocate looked to Analyzer™, an IDX/Cognos solution that allows users to quickly and accurately track physician productivity, manage care trends, payment and rejection experience, market demographics, and scheduling trends. Since deploying Analyzer, Advocate has improved its bottom line by nearly $20 million.

"Today, Advocate focuses on the use of information to improve the quality of healthcare delivery and business performance," said Stephen Krug, director of Information Systems, Advocate Medical Group. "Cognos and IDX provide our executives and physicians with the information needed to make fast, informed decisions - ultimately driving business performance improvements and customer success. IDX and Cognos continue to support our efforts to improve patient care, reduce clinical resource consumption, enhance the patient experience, and improve customer satisfaction."

"Cognos solutions have enjoyed broad-based interest from almost every vertical industry segment. From financial services to the public sector to entertainment to healthcare, Cognos has a global customer base of more than 20,000 customers across markets and around the world," said Dave Laverty, senior vice president, Global Marketing, Cognos. "Through our work with healthcare organizations, we continue to evolve and develop our industry-leading solutions to allow these organizations to generate cost efficiencies, serve their customers better, and address the demands of the market and medical community rapidly."

About Cognos

Founded in 1969, Cognos employs more than 2,600 people and serves more than 20,000 customers in over 135 countries. Our customers are involved in every industry sector including automotive, banking and insurance, energy and natural resources, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals.

Cognos BI solutions, applications, and services are sold directly and are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. These solutions are supported by an experienced field force of more than 1300 customer-facing personnel.