Company History
Medical Decisions Software, Inc. came into existence in 1985 after developing Bibtools, a shareware software product for processing generic medical bibliographies long before EndNote or Reference Manager. The company was incorporated in 1999 for the purpose of developing commercial, rather than shareware, medical software.
Our Mission
Our company’s main mission is to improve medical documentation through software solutions. Timely documentation of assessments of patients and outcomes of treatments can only help improve patient care and clinical research. Although five of the top ten reasons for malpractice: ( 1. Weak medical records, 2. Inadequate history taking, 3. Inattentive follow-up, 4. Overlooked lab, and 5. Medication errors) may be reduced by properly designed software, even in the best of hands there will still be error. Our company is looking at efficiency and error reduction in building medical documentation software to save clinician¹s documentation time. Through better indexing and priority in clinical care documentation, we are trying to improve both clinician efficiency and quality of care.
Our first product, CodeDoc, is what we call a “Docutimer®” because it automatically time stamps from the internal PDA clock each event or group of events a user documents thereby saving the user handwriting time. Since time is one of the most important factors to outcome especially in arrests, we have designed and have a provisional patent for a docutimer to help capture events and to help with timely assessments in codes or emergencies. In preliminary tests, users have been able to document more in less time and produced a print report in real-time for any one to read without worrying about legibility. CodeDoc has is own updatable drug data base that allows the user to create their own drug databases. Users may add and subtract medications and update information about each medication such as dosing. CodeDoc has a dedicated narrow focus of “code blue” or critical care emergencies supporting BLS, ALCS, PALS, and ATLS. However with help of users we plan to improve this product and make other PDA documentation products. CodeDoc version 1.71 includes the new CPR from 2005 and other enhancements
Bios
Cathy L. Schell, MLS, MD, President
Dr. Schell is a board certified family physician and geriatrician with ACLS and ATLS training as well as a certified medical librarian. She was an experienced online medical searcher after graduating from Simmons College in Boston with a Masters in Library and Information Science. Even though she has spent the past twenty years as practicing physician, she still maintains her interest in the organization, indexing, and retrieval of information for clinical medicine. She introduced the concept of prospective indexing and has lectured on it, the latest being at the International Conference on Medical Librarianship in London July 2000 ( http://www.icml.org/confproc). She is the first author and chief designer of “Geri Ann”, a web-based program for medical students at (http://www.medinfo.ufl.edu/cme/geri/). Dr. Schell was also instrumental in writing the SBIR grant that was funded by NIH and produced TriageDoc.
Al Borchers, Ph.D., Chief Programmer for CodeDoc.
Dr. Borchers has now moved on to Google, Inc. Al Borchers has been writing software for more than twenty years, developing applications from computer animation to educational software to device drivers. His software has been published by Electronic Arts, Hallmark Cards, Scholastic, and many others and has won awards from the Software Publisher’s Association and Newsweek magazine. Al has contributed drivers and other improvements to the USB subsystem in the Linux kernel. In addition, Al has a Ph.D. in computer science, with research in theory and recommender systems. He was a faculty member in the University of Minnesota Computer Science department and taught courses in systems, networking, and programming. Although he is no longer with us he was instrumental in the development of CodeDoc and part of our SBIR grant.
Randy McLaughlin is currently our independent contract programmer. He completed all of the updates and helped us finish TriageDoc for the SBIR grant. He has over 25 years of programming experience and heads his own programmning company.
William J. Schell, Vice President and CEO of Sales and Marketing
Mr. Schell brings to our company over fifty years of business experience. He was the owner of Easy Cooking Gas and the old country store in New Lebanon, NY operating continuously from 1949-1985. He was former distributor for Exxon and former President of Timbervale, Inc. He is actively involved in strategic business planning of our company.
Technical Advisor
Richard Rathe, MD Medical Informatics consultant from College of Medicine University of Florida Gainesville, FL. Dr. Rathe has helped up keep up with web development and provided the company with technical guidance. Richard Rathe, MD is our Chief Technology Officier