A-Life Medical's LifeCode Recieves AAAI Award

A-Life Medical Inc, a leader in advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology for the medical industry, announced that it has been awarded "Best in Practical Innovations of Intelligent Systems Applications" for its LifeCode application by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

The honor is presented to companies "whose solutions have demonstrated measurable real-life benefits while implemented successfully in industrial, government, scientific, and educational settings," according to AAAI sources. One of six applications chosen to receive this honor, A-Life's paper, "LifeCode: A Natural Language Processing System for Medical Coding and Data Mining," describes LifeCode's system for extracting useful data for the Emergency Medicine clinical specialty through NLP. LifeCode's innovative technology actually teaches a computer to read narrative text, extract medical facts, and automatically assign procedure codes (CPT) and diagnosis codes (ICD-9-CM).

"This award represents a milestone in A-Life's mission to use artificial intelligence to automate the medical coding and data mining industry in order to streamline their processes and ensure HCFA compliance," said Mark Morsch, Director of Natural Language Technology at A-Life Medical and co-author for the LifeCode entry.

"LifeCode is a valuable service that offers our clients the benefits of high accuracy coding, rapid turn-around times and a complete record of the entire decision making process. LifeCode's ability to formalize and store every fact that was considered in the coding process also makes it a powerful data-mining tool. For human coders, there just isn't the time or money do what LifeCode does in the blink of an eye," comments Dr. Daniel Heinze, A-Life's Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.

Criteria for this award included the innovative nature of the technology, the usefulness of the application and the level of success in deployment. A-Life Medical and the other five application winners were honored at the Innovative Application of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) conference, IAAI-2000 on August 1-3, 2000.

About A-Life Medical Inc

A-Life Medical Inc is a leader in advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology for the medical industry. This technology emulates human understanding of language. Through its expertise in NLP technology, A-Life has successfully taught a computer to "read" narrative text associated with physicians' charts and to automatically assign complex medical codes used for billing and data collection. A-Life's current focus is on coding in the emergency medicine and radiology specialties, with plans to expand to other areas of medicine, including inpatient services. Founded in 1996, A-Life Medical is a privately held company headquartered in San Diego, California. For more information on A-Life and its products, call 858-268-9999 or visit A-Life at www.alifemedical.com.

Contact A-Life Medical, Jennifer Smith, Stackig/TMP, 703-342-2607, jsmith@stackig.com.