Summary
In 1996, long before modern search engines and APIs existed, Mechsoft partnered with Hompath. It was a pioneering homeopathy software company, to develop a &v-highlight;homeopathic expert system&:v-highlight; for the healthcare domain. This was a landmark project in the history of custom &link-/industry-specific-solutions/custom-healthcare-software-development-company;healthcare&:link-/industry-specific-solutions/custom-healthcare-software-development-company; software development. This system was designed to help doctors search through gigabytes of unstructured homeopathic literature and symptoms in milliseconds. The result was a &v-highlight;revolutionary expert system&:v-highlight; still in use after nearly three decades, trusted in over &v-highlight;150 countries.&:v-highlight;
Overview
Hompath is a leading name in homeopathic &v-highlight;decision support systems,&:v-highlight; used by practitioners around the world. In the mid-1990s, they approached Mechsoft with a vision to create the world’s first intelligent homeopathic expert system, one that could analyze &v-highlight;millions of symptom combinations &:v-highlight; and suggest remedies in seconds.
Business challenge
Homeopathy is structured around &v-highlight;deep personalization&:v-highlight; treatment depends on a vast set of parameters such as symptoms, personality, time patterns, and patient preferences. Doctors often rely on thousands of pages of reference books, making manual search nearly impossible.
&v-highlight;Key challenges included: &:v-highlight;
- Handling millions of symptom combinations and thousands of book references
- Interpreting free-form, &v-highlight;unstructured data&:v-highlight; when &v-highlight;no standardized medical codes &:v-highlight; existed
- Enabling advanced search operators like AND, OR, NOT, SAME CHAPTER, SAME PARAGRAPH. Something unheard of in software at the time
- Overcoming severe &v-highlight;hardware and software limitations of the 90s &:v-highlight; (floppy drives, slow CPUs, limited RAM)
- Delivering fast, accurate, and contextual results to help doctors make decisions in real time
This required not just a database, but a smart lexical engine, a feat rarely attempted even by the leading healthcare software companies of the time.
Solution approach
1. Discovery and Algorithm Design
- Our business and technology teams collaborated closely with homeopathy doctors and domain experts. Through focused healthcare software development consulting, we &v-highlight;mapped the logical structures of symptoms,&:v-highlight; remedies, and relationships across vast literature sets.
2. Building a Smart Lexical Search Engine
- &v-highlight;Developed our own database&:v-highlight; and &v-highlight;indexing system&:v-highlight; from scratch to process gigabytes of free-form text
- Built advanced lexical search logic with &v-highlight;contextual intelligence&:v-highlight; to understand proximity, negation, and relevance
- Designed operators like AND, OR, SAME PARAGRAPH, SAME CHAPTER to mimic how doctors think
- Developed the system entirely from scratch as no off-the-shelf search engines were available at the time
3. Performance Optimization
- &v-highlight;In-memory indexing&:v-highlight; for fast reads
- &v-highlight;Lightweight algorithms&:v-highlight; tailored to symptom-path mapping
- &v-highlight;Batch processing&:v-highlight; of updates without compromising user speed
4. Product Integration and Long-Term Partnership
- Integrated the engine into Hompath’s flagship product, the first homeopathy expert system
- Contributed to UI, feature planning, and global marketing strategy
- Continued to guide product evolution, including modern &v-highlight;AI adaptation, mobile versions, and global deployment&:v-highlight;
Key features delivered
- Smart &v-highlight;lexical search engine&:v-highlight; for unstructured medical data
- Context-aware querying using AND, OR, SAME SECTION operators
- Own indexing and database structure for high-speed retrieval
- Real-time decision support for doctors based on millions of variables
- &v-highlight;Modular design&:v-highlight; that has scaled across versions for 29+ years
- &v-highlight;First-of-its-kind clinical search engine &:v-highlight; in the healthcare software development industry