Construction of a semi-automated ICD-10 coding help system to optimize medical and economic coding.

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: In order to measure the medical activity in hospitals, physicians are required to code manually information concerning a patient's stay using ICD-10. This requires trained staff and a lot of time. We propose to help speed up and facilitate the tedious task of coding patient information. METHODS: we show two methods. First, we propose an automated ICD-10-based coding help system using an automated MeSH-based indexing system and a mapping between MeSH and ICD-10 extracted from the UMLS metathesaurus. Secondly, we propose the use of drug prescriptions to complete the previous coding with the use of a mapping between a given prescription drug and the relevant ICD-10 codes (in compliance with the drug approval). RESULTS: the results of a preliminary experiment indicate that the precision of the indexing system is 40% and the recall is 30% when we compare to an economic rules-based coding and to a descriptive coding. DISCUSSION: moreover, we show that the use of prescription coding is relevant as the recall reaches 68% when the Vidal tool is used. CONCLUSION: Then, it is very interesting to complete the coding obtained automatically by the indexing/mapping system by the coding obtained from the prescriptions.