Dr. Jaques Reifman, a U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command Senior Research Scientist, was awarded the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Science and Environment Medal on Sept. 20 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

The Sammies are the civil servant's version of the Oscars and are put on by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. Each year the organization spotlights the winners of eight awards whose contributions to public service have helped improve federal government.

Reifman serves at the USAMRMC's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, where he is the director of the Department of Defense's Biotechnology High Performance Computing Software Applications Institute for Force Health Protection. Reifman is one of the Science and Environment medal finalists. The category recognizes a federal employee for a significant contribution to the nation in activities related to science and environment (including biomedicine, economics, energy, information technology, meteorology, resource conservation and space).

Ninety percent of war casualties die on the battlefield before they ever get to a surgeon. The number one cause of death is undetected internal bleeding, and over the past 10 years, Reifman has been working on a project called APPRAISE, a portable computer system he developed that can determine within 10 minutes whether an injured person is suffering a life-threatening hemorrhage. That's a vast improvement over the current norm in which emergency responders often have to wait until a patient reaches the hospital to detect internal bleeding.

Reifman and his team created a one-pound device that an EMS technician or a military medic can attach to the vital-sign monitoring system they apply to injured patients. The device sends an alert when it detects a serious hemorrhage. The APPRAISE system hasn't yet been deployed overseas, but in testing at Massachusetts General Hospital, it achieved an accuracy rate of 80 percent within 10 minutes.

The next step for APPRAISE is FDA approval and then licensing so it can be sold to local governments and the military.