Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO), now IMO Health, began in the early 1990s as part of the medical informatics department at Chicago Medical School to create a decision-support tool called MEDAS. This technology was requested by NASA to help with differential diagnosis on the space shuttle. The tool required data entry and was time consuming, so the team built a history and physical writer to capture patient history. This was used as the basis of medical students’ informatics work-up where they would enter the patient’s information and run it against different tools available at the time, including Dxplain, QMR, and others.
Life Sciences company Glaxo caught wind of this early electronic health record (EHR) and evaluated its use in the Cook County Emergency Room. Frank Naeymi-Rad and David Trace formed Intelligent Medical Systems to own the Intellectual Property in the EHR which was acquired by Glaxo in 1994. IMO was supporting early versions of what would eventually become the EHRs that are used throughout the healthcare industry today.
Fast forward to 2024, as IMO Health celebrates its 30th anniversary. This special occasion was marked last week by the gathering of hundreds of employees in Rosemont, IL, at IMO Health’s headquarters, where they engaged in meaningful breakout sessions and attended an all-company event to honor the company’s rich history and ongoing mission.
Keep scrolling for a brief history of IMO Health.
1994 | A team led by Frank Naeymi-Rad formed IMO as a vehicle to help commercialize Glaxo’s original EMR product.
1995 | IMO works with Glaxo on data capture and analytics during the AIDS Epidemic.
2004 | Epic adopts IMO clinical interface terminology in their model system EMR software.
2006 | IMO’s interface terminology maps to billing code systems SNOMED CT® and ICD-9-CM.
2008 | IMO launches its Clinical Interface Terminology product.
2009 | IMO launches IMO Search Portal.
2012 | International Classification of Diseases (ICD) version 10 CM is announced.
2012 | IMO begins working with Meditech to help the company meet its Meaningful Use criteria.
2013 | IMO partners with HCA to improve its EHR workflows by creating terminology from thousands of pages of clinical dictionaries.
2014 | IMO releases an initial version of Problem IT with mappings to ICD-10-CM.
2015 | IMO launches Intelligent Problem List.
2016 | First Zika case is reported in the US. The first case of maternal complications is documented in an Epic site in New Jersey using IMO.
2019 | IMO launches IMO Core, IMO Core Procedure, and IMO Core Periop.
2019 | IMO opens new headquarters in Rosemont, Illinois.
2020 | COVID-19 is declared an international pandemic. IMO begins updating clinical terms at the outset to help doctors more easily code the disease to track its spread.
2020 | IMO Precision Normalize is launched.
2023 | IMO acquires Melax Tech, enhancing IMO’s portfolio of solutions with award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.
2023 | IMO launches IMO Studio, IMO Precision Normalize with NPL, IMO Precision Sets, and IMO Discovery for Problems.
2024 | IMO relaunches with a new name – IMO Health – and visual identity reflecting the company’s evolution as a clinical data intelligence business.
Today, IMO Health solutions are used by every major EHR vendor in the US and leveraged at the point of care by more than 740,000 healthcare professionals. The company’s pioneering work in clinical terminology remains the industry standard and has formed the foundation of innovative solutions used throughout healthcare, from health tech and drug discovery to population health initiatives, payer processes, and beyond.
“Our goal now is to become the data quality enabler for all of healthcare, for the whole ecosystem; to support others as they create, analyze, and extract what they need from clinical data, and to actually make that data useful,” said IMO Health CEO, Ann Barnes, in a recent speech. “This 30th anniversary is really just the beginning.”
To learn about IMO Health’s data solutions, backed by award-winning clinical AI and rich, highly specialized terminology, click here.
SNOMED and SNOMED CT® are registered trademarks of SNOMED International.
