Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO)
IMO (Intelligent Medical Objects) is a private company located in Northbrook, Illinois. Since 1994 they have been specializing in developing, managing, and licensing medical vocabularies and providing the information to the various vendor partners for use in electronic health records. Intelligent Medical Objects usually partners with various health care organizations, electronic health records (EHR) developers and medical contents providers. IMO works closely with several companies such as Epic, Allscripts, MEDITECH, and Cerner to support uniform labelling of health care profiles, and the services they render together with their outcomes all across their enterprise. IMO provide vocabularies for these companies’ health care software applications which are meant to be used by various hospitals and physicians clients’ networks. This is to ensure health care organizations benefit from efficient, dependable, qualitative service, cost effective operations and accountability.
Providers are constantly struggling with choosing the correct medical term on documentation for their patients, which in turn creates issues by not always having the correct billing code applied. IMO helps to map out diagnostic terminologies to medical concepts and billing codes with their clinical interface terminology launched in 1995. IMO products such as Problem IT and Procedure IT are to assist physicians in choosing the correct medical terms for their cases and also to find the correct billing code. This enables physicians to capture their patient’s condition more accurately; allowing the use of more familiar terms and enhances the electronic health records workflow. This improves physician’s satisfaction and reduces all unnecessary distractions that are associated with physician’s communications, resulting in lower number of rejected claims.
The IMO regularly updates these products medical vocabularies in order to map them with more standardized vocabularies such as the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Each of the IMO terms within the clinical interface terminology is eventually mapped with the appropriate administrative code set. IMO handles all re-mappings when the code rules changes and enables the physicians to carry on leveraging the vocabularies.
In 2012, IMO established a research and development office at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign staffed by the university student interns. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in February 2013 published an article showing how IMO’s interface terminology was found to be accurate in categorizing coronary heart disease and heart failure episodes. It was discovered that the terminology service was 32% to 42% more accurate than the algorithms that use reimbursement coding and the various classification techniques.
IMO is committed to providing innovative, healthcare informatics products that will empower physicians in order to improve their efficiency and decision making in the delivery of health care services and is also a requirement for ARRA.