NEW YORK, (October 6, 2008) - Powerful natural language processing software that extracts medical information from cluttered clinical records, once a tedious and expensive manual process, is being made available commercially for the first time, Columbia University Medical Center announced today.
In an exclusive global license agreement between the university and NLP International Corporation, the patented MedLEE™ program will be brought to market after years of international testing by researchers in government and industry. Once released, the software will dramatically decrease the resources needed to extract and code medical records.
"MedLEE™ has been used in the academic community for many years to develop clinical applications that have been shown to improve the quality of health care," said Carol Friedman PhD, Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, who developed the technology. "I am very pleased that this great product is now available to the business community where it can continue to contribute in many ways to improve health care."
Millions of dictated and typed medical reports once required a laborious and time-consuming process of data entry and manipulation, where highly trained and expensive experts manually culled the needed information. The MedLEE™ technology does away with much of this work, automatically reviewing and distilling relevant clinical information. Once extracted, the information is easily available for further clinical processes like billing, reimbursement, analytics, data mining and others.
"MedLEE™ is considered by many in the field as a gold standard for unstructured medical text processing, but has not been available as a commercial, enterprise-ready product," said Donna See, a program director in Columbia's Office of Science and Technology Ventures, which brokered the deal. "We are very pleased to be partnering with NLP International to introduce MedLEE™ to these markets."
MedLEE™ has been successfully tested by large hospital systems and government agencies, including the New York Presbyterian Hospital, the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Department of Defense. Several pharmaceutical companies and healthcare information system vendors are currently evaluating it.
"A significant proportion of the huge amount of health care data resides in the form of unstructured, natural language text and the amount of that data is growing dramatically," said Bernie Keppler, founder and chief executive of NLP International. "Ready access to this information is critical to improving quality and access to health care."
Dr. Bob Sideli, Chief Information Officer at Columbia University Medical Center, said the already widespread deployment and use of MedLEE™ throughout the research and healthcare communities prove the system's future commercial success.
"It will contribute substantially to higher efficiency in the EMR industry due to its superior functionality in medical data extraction, coding, analytics and data mining," Sideli said.
David Lerner, who oversees new ventures for the university's Office of Science & Technology Ventures, said the university has found the right partner in NLP International to successfully bring the powerful new software to the business community.
"This venture will add to the many successful technology spin-off ventures for which Columbia University is known," Lerner said.
About Columbia University Medical Center
A leading academic and research university, Columbia continually seeks to advance the frontiers of knowledge and to foster a campus community deeply engaged in understanding and addressing the complex global issues of our time. Founded in 1754 as King's College, Columbia University in the City of New York is the country's fifth oldest institution of higher learning.
Columbia University's technology transfer office, Science & Technology Ventures, specializes in technology commercialization via licensing and new company formation. It facilitates the transfer of scientific discovery and innovation from the university setting into the marketplace touting more than 70 license transactions and 12 start-up companies launched in 2007. For more information on STV, please visit www.stv.columbia.edu.
About NLP International Corporation
NLP International Corporation offers health care IT professionals a world-class product: MedLEE™ - Medical Language Extraction and Encoding. The already widely used and tested natural language processor is applicable to a wide range of medical domains and can be readily adopted to specific customer requirements based on its knowledge component design. It has proven its effectiveness for coding to UMLS, SNOMED and ICD-9 records. MedLEE™'s design offers unique advantages in speed, accuracy and lower cost to our customers and partners.For more information on NLP International, please visit www.nlpapplications.com
