Columbia University and Health Fidelity, Inc. announced today that they have entered into a license agreement for commercialization of Columbia's MedLEE Natural Language Processing technology. The license grants Health Fidelity exclusive rights to a portfolio of patents, software code, and trademarks for commercialization of MedLEE-related products and services dedicated to improving healthcare.
"We're delighted to be commercializing MedLEE, one of the most reliable and heavily used clinical natural language processing (NLP) engines," said Dan Riskin, CEO of Health Fidelity. "Through natural language processing technology, Health Fidelity enables medical practitioners and administrators to effectively make use of the wealth of information they collect so they can make better medical decisions, monitor and improve quality of care, and enable R&D that will bring us to the next frontier in healthcare. Our Fidelity Platform incorporates this technology and provides a robust, high quality, cloud-based clinical NLP platform that easily integrates with and improves the capabilities of our solution partners' applications."
Clinical NLP supports automated extraction of discrete medical information, critical to meeting goals in Meaningful Use, accountable care organizations (ACO), and ICD 10 conversion. Through two decades of development and improvement, MedLEE (Medical Language Extracting and Encoding) has the most associated peer reviewed publications of any clinical NLP engine and is associated with many of the earliest patents in the space.
Dr. Carol Friedman, inventor of MedLEE and Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University Medical Center, will serve on Health Fidelity's advisory board, where she will support the transfer and integration of the technology into Health Fidelity's platform products. "We chose to partner with Health Fidelity because of the qualifications of its team, its substantial experience with MedLEE, and its vision for natural language processing as essential technology to empower and advance healthcare," said Dr. Friedman.
"It was very important for us to select a partner with broad as well as deep understanding of the transformative potential of natural language processing in the medical and clinical domains," said Donna See, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Columbia Technology Ventures, the technology transfer office of Columbia University. "This is an exciting opportunity that we hope will pave the path for a new era of data-driven healthcare."
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