Automatic construction of rule-based ICD-9-CM coding systems

Background: In this paper we focus on the problem of automatically constructing ICD-9-CM coding systems for radiology reports. ICD-9-CM codes are used for billing purposes by health institutes and are assigned to clinical records manually following clinical treatment. Since this labeling task requires expert knowledge in the field of medicine, the process itself is costly and is prone to errors as human annotators have to consider thousands of possible codes when assigning the right ICD-9-CM labels to a document. In this study we use the datasets made available for training and testing automated ICD-9-CM coding systems by the organisers of an International Challenge on Classifying Clinical Free Text Using Natural Language Processing in spring 2007. The challenge itself was dominated by entirely or partly rule-based systems that solve the coding task using a set of hand crafted expert rules. Since the feasibility of the construction of such systems for thousands of ICD codes is indeed questionable, we decided to examine the problem of automatically constructing similar rule sets that turned out to achieve a remarkable accuracy in the shared task challenge. Results: Our results are very promising in the sense that we managed to achieve comparable results with purely hand-crafted ICD-9-CM classifiers. Our best model got a 90.26 % F measure on the training dataset and an 88.93 % F measure on the challenge test dataset, using the micro-averaged Fβ=1 measure, the official evaluatio

O programa de qualidade no setor hospitalar e as atividades reais da enfermagem: o caso da medicação The quality program in the hospital sector and the nursing activities: the medication case

O objetivo deste estudo é analisar a política de qualidade implementada pela gestão hospitalar na farmácia central e as características da atividade de medicar realizada pelo auxiliar de enfermagem (AE). Adotou-se a abordagem proposta pela escola francesa de ergonomia. Avaliou-se o funcionamento do hospital e estudou-se a atividade do trabalho do AE em tempo real, possibilitando compreender as dificuldades enfrentadas no cotidiano e as estratégias implementadas. Viu-se que a atividade de trabalho está inserida num paradoxo organizacional em que a qualidade exigida para o cumprimento da missão de medicar dificulta o cumprimento da própria tarefa, comprometendo, em última análise, a assistência ao paciente.<br>The aim of this study is to analyze the quality policy implemented by the hospital management in the central chemistry and the characteristics of the medication activities performed by the nursing assistants (NA).The approach of the French School of Ergonomics was adopted. It was assessed the Hospital working situation and the activity performed by the nursing assistant in real time which have allowed to understand the difficulties faced by the workers and the strategies adopted to overcome them. It was observed that the working activity is part of an organizational paradox where the expected quality to fulfil the medication mission has been difficult to achieve, endangering, ultimately the assistance to the patients