Use of a conceptual semi-automatic ICD-9 encoding system in an hospital environment

The necessity of encoding medical diagnosis has become essential, not only for medical purposes, but also for community-based research, epidemiology and economy, but there is a real lack of tools ensuring good quality and exhaustivity of diagnosis encoding. To achieve this goal whilst avoiding the need of to much computer processing power, we have built a tool using some natural language processing techniques, like a simple semantical representation and partial symbolic queries. We have also tried to build a cost-effectiveness system, which will run on any PC-Windows based system, with a good user-friendliness quality.