Medical company partners with hospital group

San Diego Business Journal, March 3, 2008 by Jaimy Lee

A-Life Medical Inc. announced Feb. 21 that it had partnered with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to create, and apply, its ICODE medical coding technology.

The San Diego-based private medical company mainly serves billing companies and physician practice groups, but this new partnership, called A-Life Hospital, will be used to address the coding needs of a hospital site instead.

The A-Life Hospital venture is also based in Pittsburgh, although it is a division of A-Life Medical.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is a nonprofit medical center made up of 20 hospitals and 400 outpatient facilities. It has a staff of 48,000 employees and reports $7 billion in revenue annually.

The ICODE software is used to scan a patient's electronic medical record and then provide a principal diagnosis and a list of possible complications and concurring diseases. Coding is produced using natural language processing, or NLP, technology.

The technology will be used for 65,000 inpatient cases at five university-affiliated hospitals, beginning mid-2008, according to the A-Life Hospital Web site.

Send health care news to Jaimy Lee at jlee@sdbj.com.