Diagnosis Code Assignment Support Using Random Indexing of Patient Records – A Qualitative Feasibility Study

Abstract

The prediction of diagnosis codes is typically based on free-text entries in clinical documents. Previous attempts to tackle this problem range from strictly rule-based systems to utilizing various classification algorithms, resulting in varying degrees of success. A novel approach is to build a word space model based on a corpus of coded patient records, associating co-occurrences of words and ICD-10 codes. Random Indexing is a computationally efficient implementation of the word space model and may prove an effective means of providing support for the assignment of diagnosis codes. The method is here qualitatively evaluated for its feasibility by a physician on clinical records from two Swedish clinics. The assigned codes were in this initial experiment found among the top 10 generated suggestions in 20% of the cases, but a partial match in 77% demonstrates the potential of the method.