Aspect Medical Systems Announces Comparative Effectiveness Research Collaboration and Licensing Agreement with Cleveland Clinic

Aspect Medical Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: ASPM) today announced a five year comparative effectiveness research collaboration with Cleveland Clinic focused on improving patient outcomes following surgery. The collaboration will utilize the Clinic’s electronic medical record system to identify anesthetic management practices that are associated with optimum outcomes. These practices will then be tested prospectively utilizing real-time decision support methods. The company has also signed a licensing agreement with Cleveland Clinic that will cover the intellectual property that emerges from the collaboration.

“Hospitals and clinicians are increasingly interested in delivering greater patient value by identifying clinical practices that result in better outcomes, higher quality and lower costs,” said Nassib Chamoun, president and CEO of Aspect Medical Systems. “We believe that anesthetic management decisions play a key role in enabling better patient outcomes. Through our collaboration with the Clinic we will utilize our expertise in analyzing large clinical databases and the Clinic’s extensive clinical data registry to evaluate, on a patient risk and procedure-adjusted basis, how different approaches to anesthetic management impact patient outcomes following surgery. Ultimately, our goal is to define interventions and decision support systems that will lead to further improvements in clinical practice and patient outcomes.”

As part of the collaboration, researchers will refine “risk stratification” methodologies to compare patient records from more than 85,000 surgical patients treated at Cleveland Clinic with a baseline risk assessment system derived from 34 million patient records obtained from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The CMS dataset is comprised of a wide variety of patient populations, medical procedures, and care environments, enabling researchers to fairly evaluate and compare adjusted hospital outcome measures such as duration of hospitalization, mortality at 30 days post-surgery and mortality after one year.

“The challenge with evaluating unadjusted hospital outcome reports is that baseline patient risk varies considerably. For example, even for a given procedure performed by the same surgeon in the same hospital, mortality may vary considerably due to patient demographics, pre-existing illness and disease stage,” said Daniel Sessler, MD, professor and chair, Department of Outcomes Research at Cleveland Clinic. “Through this research collaboration, the hope is to further develop a predictive risk-adjustment model that uses national billing codes and readily available demographic characteristics.”

In addition to conducting this risk adjusted analysis of outcomes data, the collaboration will also include development of innovative comparative effectiveness methodologies to prospectively test how different anesthetic management interventions, decision support alarms, and clinician education initiatives impact outcomes when applied on an ongoing basis during routine clinical care.

Preliminary results from studies conducted as part of this research collaboration have been accepted for presentation at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the ASA.

Aspect also announced today a decision by CMS to implement a coding methodology to allow hospitals to indicate when BIS monitoring was part of patient care. CMS has identified existing ICD-9-CM procedure codes for hospitals to report “intraoperative anesthetic effect monitoring and titration (IAEMT)” as part of the claims submission process to Medicare. IAEMT is the procedural description for BIS-guided anesthesia care. “The new coding methodology becomes effective on October 1, 2009 and will facilitate large-scale evaluations of the impact of BIS-guided care on patient outcomes using the Medicare claims database,” said Scott Kelley, MD, vice president and medical director of Aspect.

About Aspect Medical Systems, Inc.

Aspect Medical Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: ASPM) is a global market leader in brain monitoring technology. To date, the Company's Bispectral Index (BIS) technology has been used to assess approximately 32 million patients and has been the subject of more than 3,100 published articles and abstracts. BIS technology is installed in approximately 80 percent of hospitals listed in the July 2008 U.S. News and World Report ranking of America's Best Hospitals and in approximately 73 percent of all U.S. operating rooms. In the last twelve months BIS technology was used in approximately 19 percent of all U.S. surgical procedures requiring general anesthesia or deep sedation. Aspect Medical Systems has OEM agreements with eight leading manufacturers of patient monitoring systems.

Safe Harbor Statement

Certain statements in this release are forward-looking within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including without limitation statements with regards to the expected benefits and outcomes of the Company’s research collaboration with Cleveland Clinic. Forward-looking statements used in this release may contain the words "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "plans," "seeks," "estimates," "will," "may," or similar expressions. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results to be materially different from those indicated by such forward-looking statements. There are a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking. For example, the parties may not be able to successfully complete the comparative outcomes research that is the subject of the collaboration. Even if the study is successfully completed, the Company may not be able to successfully define factors that lead to improved patient outcomes and/or generate findings that do, in fact, improve patient outcomes. There are other factors that could cause Aspect's actual results to vary from its forward-looking statements, including without limitation those set forth under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2008 as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, any forward-looking statements represent the Company’s views only as of the date of this press release and should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any subsequent date. While the Company may elect to update forward-looking statements in the future, it specifically disclaims any obligation to do so, even if its expectations change. Therefore, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.

Aspect, Bispectral Index and BIS are registered trademarks of Aspect Medical Systems, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks and company names are the property of their respective owners.