History of DiagnosisPro

DiagnosisPro was initially developed by two physicians:

• Dr. Charles Meader, a board-certified internist who developed the disease database for DiagnosisPro
• Dr. Hugo Pribor, a clinical pathologist and co-designer of the first mini-computer hospital-based laboratory information system

Ever since graduating from the Boston University School of Medicine in 1962, Dr. Meader has been engineering methods of coding and listing medical information. He has compiled lists of clinical material and relationships daily for over 35 years. With other colleagues, he marketed LABSEARCH (1983), LABSEARCH286 (1989), and then the REMIND4 diagnostic software (1993) with Dr. Pribor. REMIND4 has been expanded, improved and is constantly updated. This software is now called DiagnosisPro.

In the beginning, Dr. Meader designed index cards of diseases and attributes to sort; he overlayed photography methods or an x-ray summation of dots (indicating the position and intensity) on the cards. Next, with computers and data file management, he named and categorized almost 9,000 diseases/drugs and 13,000 attributes (each one stripped of its synonymic noise) and coded each with a unique randomly assigned six-digit token or symbol. With the difficulty of semantics and confusion of terms removed, the use of symbol strings instead of "language" strings resulted in speedy sort-and-retrieval times.

In 1981 and 1982, Dr. Meader published and sold these codes, categories and methods in a seven volume set of Indexes. These Microcomputer Diagnostic Indexing (MDI) volumes were sold by the MDI project in Hingham, MA. This effort was recognized by the editors and principals at Springer Verlag who placed his photo on the cover of their premier issue of "MD and Computers Journal" (Medcomp) in 1983 and it featured his story and personal efforts.

APPC Data Processing, Inc. in Nashville and Dr. Hugo Pribor, MD., Ph.D. took the strong points of LABSEARCH286 and greatly improved on its drawbacks to develop the REMIND4 software. The streamlined and updated program - now named DiagnosisPro -- currently contains 11,000 diseases/drugs, 30,000 findings, and 300,000 relationships. DiagnosisPro is developed exclusively by MedTech USA, Inc. in Los Angeles, California and distributed by many outlets worldwide.

Dr. Simon Kerendian, co-founder of MedTech USA and Vice President of Technology designed the new interface of DiagnosisPro for the desktop, hand-held, and on-line versions. He is also the coordinator between the editors of DiagnosisPro and the programmers.

Because of its development history, DiagnosisPro is ordered, transparent, intuitive, speedy, and extremely useful for medical practitioners.