KYOS Systems Inc. received a competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the Department of Defense in November 2004. Sponsored by the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Command (TATRC), the Department of Defense's (DoD) Request for Proposal (RFP), entitled Digital Archive and Access to Lifetime Military Medical Records, solicited solutions to address the need to digitize the medical records of retiring and discharged military personnel. The goal was for patients and authorized healthcare providers to be able to access and easily find important data needed to provide optimal medical care for our veterans while providing backend data mining support.

In the fall of 2005 KYOS was pleased to have won a competitive Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award based on our Phase 1 performance. KYOS has since completed development and further built upon our novel award-winning technology for the (DoD).

Our goal is to digitize paper medical records so that:

• Any field on any form can be found and analyzed, allowing unprecedented granularity not found in simple scan and store methodologies
• Users can move from found field to full form in one click for ease of use and full context search and analysis
• Data from individual fields as well as whole forms may be presented to a wide variety of recognition engines to optimize character, mark and handwriting recognition
• Digital data can be made compatible with systems for full continuity of information flow and optimized data sharing between critical users

Shortcomings of existing systems

For the DoD, simple scanning and indexing of static documents was not sufficient, since many military personnel records encompass hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of highly variable forms. Off-the-shelf solutions simply convert paper to PDFs, imposing a high cost to scan and store without giving end users sophisticated access to the information they need at the point of care.

Objective of the DoD's RFP

The Department of Defense's requirements included making every military personnel and their dependents entire medical history easily accessible via an intuitive, easy to use search interface, while providing a rich data mining image repository for research. KYOS TransFORM™ provides these capabilities.

The KYOS approach

KYOS Systems' novel technology recognizes each incoming form, extracts all data elements, whether text, stamp, image, or handwriting, and tags and stores each field. Standard naming conventions are used to generate meta-tags for fields within forms. Thus forms from any service, including the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or medical treatment facilities, can be 'harmonized.' Data becomes portable and interoperable, for full information sharing among different treatment facilities, no matter where the patient goes.

The result is full medical information visibility for our military in a format that can be securely shared and ported. Having patient medical information available at the point of care, wherever and whenever that may be, is a crucial step in improving and optimizing the healthcare our military personnel receive.

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