10th May 2007

Boston Scientific Corporation has released data reflecting clinical event notification statistics from the first 10,000 patients monitored on the Latitude Patient Management System. This data represents the industry's largest experience with wireless remote monitoring of implantable cardiac devices for one year.

Remote monitoring between regularly scheduled follow-ups allows clinicians to observe changes sooner in their device patients and gives them the ability to intervene earlier where appropriate.

Of the 56,000 monitoring months included in the 10,000-patient population over a mean follow-up of five months, the Latitude Patient Management system detected 597 patients with sustained atrial arrhythmias for more than 24 hours and 968 patients who received shock therapy for spontaneous ventricular arrhythmias.

"The ability to detect and notify clinicians of these types of events sooner can impact patient outcomes," said Leslie A. Saxon, M.D., Chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, University of Southern California, and national Co-Principal Investigator for the RAPID-RF Study that is characterizing types of clinical event notifications and interventions with the wireless system. "For example, patients with atrial fibrillation, particularly those with heart failure are at risk of stroke. Early identification of this arrhythmia, which may be asymptomatic, enables physicians to intervene with treatments to mitigate this risk."

Boston Scientific has the only remote patient management system that is capable of monitoring virtually all its implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) and cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillator (CRT-D) patients between follow-ups, and alerting physicians to important clinical events through either wireless or wanded technology.

Boston Scientific has more than 25,000 patients enrolled on the Latitude system at more than 1,000 clinics across the United States. The Latitude Patient Management system will be demonstrated during the Heart Rhythm Society (HRS) Conference, May 9-12, in Denver, Colorado, at Booth #335.

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