Lexeme Technologies, LLC

Lexeme Technologies is a start-up company in Iowa City created by Donald Macfarlane to exploit the Lexeme Theories, which enable the prediction of what topic a professional writing a report is going to want to address next. The product under development is LexeNotes®.

What is LexeNotes?

Revolutionizing patient care to make the EMR work for all of us

Throughout history, we have seen lots of improvements to the way we write medical notes. That was until the Electronic Medical Record, which like the technologies before it, was supposed to make healthcare better. But notes got worse – they are bloated, inaccurate, incomplete, contradictory, and disorderly. Now doctors waste their time working for the EMR, when the EMR should work for them. At Lexeme Technologies, we want to reimagine the interaction between the doctor and the EMR. We built a platform to vastly improve the quality of medical notes, and make the EMR work for all of us.

Create beautiful notes that are fully coded

LexeNotes creates beautiful notes that are complete, organized, grammatically correct which are sent to the EMR with just one click.We regard the typical note as being a stream of fragments of text (which we term lexemes, each of which can be captured into a large database).Our platform offers you a series of templates, each consisting of a question and a collection of possible answers. When you select one of the answers, the platform adds the associated fragment of text to the output document, and uses special algorithms to calculate which template you will need next to write a really good note. On completion, you merely print the completed note or cut-and-paste it into your lovely electronic medical record system.And what if you don’t like the text fragments we offer? Well, you can add new ones or change existing ones, and the changes you make will be added to the database for all other users. Just like Wikipedia….LexeNotes depends on willing experts to generate the database – and that includes you!

LexeNotes exploits two novel ideas that solve major problems preventing useful computerization of patient care.

The first problem is that computer programmers have had a lot of difficulty extracting good data from even the best medical notes written by skilled clinicians in free text (and you are aware that you make a spelling or clumsy grammatical error at least once or twice a decade). Our novel and disruptive idea is that we have reversed the process. Instead of computers trying to understand the ideas in human-created text, we have developed computer techniques that takes human ideas and converts them in to grammatically correct text which addresses all the necessary facets and subtleties of patient care.

The second problem is the essential need to protect patient confidentiality. This generally requires sophisticated (and expensive!) data management systems that impede the ability of one healthcare system to communicate with another.

We have solved this problem by ensuring that notes written by LexeNotes contain no patient identifiers. If malicious third parties steal all our completed notes, all they would harvest would be a strings of computer codes which contain no patient identifiers, and which can only be interpreted by accessing LexeNotes. We will be constantly upgrading our system and security measures to reduce the risk of malicious hacking.