Press Release
Intelligent Medical Objects And The American Health Information Management Association Announce Agreement
10/14/2005
Northbrook, IL, October 14, 2005 - Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc. (IMO®) and the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) announced that they have agreed to a multiyear contract where AHIMA will validate and enhance IMO's vocabularies and IMO will provide information technology support to AHIMA.
AHIMA, the leading organization for health information management (HIM) professionals, will validate the cross-links from IMO's Personal Health Terminology™ (PHT) vocabularies to administrative vocabularies such as ICD and CPT™. The ongoing effort will focus initially on the mappings from the terms in IMO® ICD Enhanced™ to ICD-9-CM. IMO ICD Enhanced allows clinicians to quickly and easy find the right terms for describing patient conditions, while links to ICD-9-CM generate administrative codes for billing and links to SNOMED® CT can be used for data analysis and interoperability. AHIMA will continually validate any new content or revisions that occur in IMO's vocabularies, especially when updates to administrative coding systems occur.
"Clinicians and health information professionals alike will benefit from AHIMA's expertise," said Dr. Andrew S. Kanter, President and Chief Medical Officer of Intelligent Medical Objects. He added, "IMO's terminologies have been created by clinicians for clinicians. AHIMA's contribution will ensure that our vocabularies are accurate from the HIM perspective so that clinicians can focus on caring for their patients. We are also pleased to help provide technological tools and services to an industry-leading health care organization such as AHIMA." Frank Naeymi-Rad, Chief Executive officer, remarked that IMO's partnership with AHIMA emphasizes IMO's commitment to improving the usability and reliability of health care information for our EHR clients such as Epic Systems and HealthVision.
The AHIMA has already completed a validation of an initial set of terms from IMO ICD Enhanced. "We are glad for the opportunity to help refine a product that facilitates communication between clinicians and HIM professionals and promotes more complete and accurate documentation and billing," said Sandra R. Fuller, MA, Executive Vice President and COO of AHIMA. "HIM professionals gain both productivity and efficiency when electronic tools enhance the coding process to deliver a "code once-use many times" approach to clinical data management."
Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc. (IMO) provides innovative health information products that improve documentation, information retrieval, decision-making, and efficiency throughout the health care delivery process. IMO's clinical vocabulary solutions bridge the information gap between users with different information needs. Mappings to standard vocabularies and coding systems support decision support and literature retrieval. IMO's medication solution allows electronic prescribing systems to find and use critical medication and indication information and automatically create customized patient education materials. IMO's Local Medical Review Policy (LMRP) solution provides region-specific medical necessity checking. Health care organizations can use IMO's business intelligence tools to perform quality assurance and outcomes research, increasing efficiency and decreasing costs.
The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) is the national association of HIM professionals. AHIMA's 50,000 members are dedicated to the effective management of personal health information needed to deliver quality healthcare to the public. Founded in 1928 to improve the quality of medical records, AHIMA is committed to advancing the HIM profession in an increasingly electronic and global environment through leadership in advocacy, education, certification, and lifelong learning.