In 1985 Dr. Frank Naeymi-Rad (Chairman and CEO) and Dr. David Trace combined their knowledge of computer science and medicine to create a more efficient system for healthcare providers to categorize patient information. Their first project centered on a Bayesian pattern-recognition expert system for medical diagnosis. They were able to maintain vocabularies essential to the functioning of that system by utilizing relational database technology.

In 1986, they examined whether the use of expert systems was possible not only for diagnosis but also for treatment protocols and the longitudinal management of patient data. This early work was funded by NASA Kennedy Space Center and delivered a minimal-memory-required, multi-membership, pattern-recognition, expert system with a knowledge base of 95 diseases for use in emergency medicine.

The team recognized that there was no standard comparison of medical vocabulary available (all future work with expert systems would ultimately depend on this) so they used the second year medical school introductory course in clinical medicine as a foundation for all medical record keeping.

In 1989 and 1990 the research team focused on the importance of computerized medical records not only as a resource for the patient's medical history, but also as a source for medical education at the point of clinical care.

In 1991, the team deployed a computerized medical record in the Cook County Hospital Emergency Room in Chicago for use by fourth year medical students. This demonstrated the emergence of the longitudinal computerized medical record as a key factor in healthcare automation.

For their research into the design of a graphical user interface and a knowledge flow that would accommodate and promote physician usage, Dr. Naeymi-Rad, Dr. Trace, and their technical team were nominated for the Smithsonian Institute's award for using technology for the benefit of humanity. During that year, they were also awarded a National Library of Medicine contract to participate with the Unified Medical Language Systems (UMLS) in the area of medical record coding.

In 1994, after securing a contract with Glaxo Wellcome to pilot the research and development of a computerized medical record, Dr. Naeymi-Rad and Dr. Trace formed Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO®). They brought together a core team of two additional physicians, Dr. Fabio Almeida and Dr. Andrew Kanter (President), as well as several of the computer scientists who had worked on the previous projects, and expanded the development team to include physicians with experience in internal medicine, family practice, radiology, cardiology, infectious disease, nutrition, obstetrics, gynecology, endocrinology and epidemiology.

The IMO® team developed a highly successful Electronic Medical Record system for Glaxo Wellcome. The EMR, known as HealthPoint ACS™ , passed through a series of owners, and continues to be marketed successfully by A4 Systems. This EMR experience was both very successful and very expensive, and it indicated that foolproof medical terminology for diagnoses, treatments and medications coupled with flexible data base technology would be fundamental to any future success in computer-documented medicine.

IMO® spent the next five years in a consulting mode and built an array of licensed informatics components for entities like QuadraMed, Lucent Technologies, the AMA and SMS. This resulted in unusual depth in (a) the medical vocabularies (ICD, CPT®, SNOMED® , UMLS, MESH, Medi-Span®, Multum®, HCPCS, etc.) used in coding for claims and research AND (b) the advanced relational technologies to exploit them.

Two innovations deriving from this work were (1) the Personal Health Terminology™ (PHT), a proprietary lexicon that contains nearly 160,000 clinical and consumer medical terms all mapped to fully billable ICD-9 codes, and (2) IMO® Health Search™, a highly innovative Internet search application for medical knowledge.

Parallel to these activities, IMO® invested heavily in building a better development environment for EMRs, data warehouses and repositories. This effort has culminated in the robust database development product ADM (Adaptive Data Manager™), field-tested for several years, yet only recently released for general sale and use. ADM has become a tremendously successful tool for building and maintaining rapidly growing and evolving database applications at a fraction of the typical investment in money, time and people.