Re: [Gnumed-devel] clinician input wanted: how to implement "coding"

[Jim Busser]

On 2009-12-04, at 8:28 PM, Jim Busser wrote:

> - appending the visual indication (when present) after the Health Issue or 
> Encounter

As I further think about it, I am realizing that it is at the point where a 
Health issue or Encounter is being named that a phrasewheel might usefully pull 
up codes as part of pulling up previously-used clinical narrative names for 
health issues and encounters.

What I did in my own simple billing system was to build myself a table of 
paired values in which the paired value was instantiated as a pair

        code, official descriptor

from a lookup table of (in my case) ICD9 codes however I always found the 
official descriptions awkward and would immediately modify (in my own daily-use 
table) the value of the "official descriptor" to make it something more 
meaningful... I might insert or append characters like

        (CHF)

for congestive heart failure or might add

        e.g. <example>

for a disorder that I do occasionally see but which does not merit its own 
exact code but instead must be fitted inside a more general one. Maybe this 
approach can be leveraged so that even despite allowing to further modify a 
patient-specific character string of how we want to describe this patient's 
highly individual instance of disease, maybe it could still borrow as a 
starting point from a daily use table that had been developed in the local 
praxis from reference coding tables.