About / History
The roots of Corticon date to 1995, when our founder, Dr. Mark Allen, began research on rule-based systems and their application to healthcare delivery. During his medical training at UCLA, Dr. Allen experienced firsthand the power of better decisions. The difference between a good and bad decision from a physician can mean the difference between life and death for the patient. The problem is, with so much to know, how can we possibly know the right decision? And, with a continually accelerating rate of change, the right decision today could well be the wrong decision tomorrow.
Dr. Allen saw a solution in the research of Drs. Larry Baraff and David Schriger, who were attempting to encode the logic of clinical practice guidelines into rule-based systems to provide in-process guidance to healthcare professionals. Example applications included the diagnosis and treatment of occupational exposures, recurrent seizures, and pediatric fever. Their initial clinical trials proved that such systems could significantly improve clinical decision-making, positively impacting both quality and cost of care.
Dr. Allen saw the future. Soon, groups of medical experts would maintain automated guidelines, made accessible through the web to healthcare professionals and patients worldwide. This way, we could all make the right decision at the right time. The problem was that such systems were prohibitively difficult to build and maintain. Over a period of years, Dr. Allen invented a unique approach to modeling decision-making logic that empowered the medical experts to directly manage even the most complex logic. This helped to dramatically accelerate the development and maintenance of the clinical applications.
In early 2000, Dr. Allen chose to leave his medical career to commercialize the invention. He joined forces with CTO Pedram Abrari, an expert in Enterprise Java, XML and AI technologies. Mr. Abrari brought years of experience developing rule-based systems in financial services and HR, and many ideas to incorporate into the new product. Together with a founding team of expert engineers, and armed with a deep understanding of the inherent difficulties of traditional rule-based systems, they began building what would become the Corticon Business Rules Management System.
Very quickly, the Corticon solution gained traction in insurance and financial services for applications such as claims adjudication and securities trading. Today, the Corticon solution is used to power billions of decisions per day across diverse industries and applications, offering unprecedented business agility and control.