LifeCode(TM) — A Natural Language Processing System for Medical Coding and Data Mining

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LifeCode(TM) (patent pending) is a Natural Language Processing and Expert System that extracts demographic and clinical information from free-text clinical records. The initial application of LifeCode is for the Emergency Medicine clinical specialty. An application for Diagnostic Radiology is now in beta-test. A pilot program for performing data mining on acute care clinical records has been completed. The LifeCode NLP engine uses a large number of specialist readers whose particular outputs are combined at various levels to form an integrated picture of the patient’s medical condition(s), course of treatment and disposition. The LifeCode Expert System performs the tasks of combining complementary information, deleting redundant information, assessing the level of medical risk and level of service represented in the clinical record and producing an output that is appropriate for input to an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system or a billing system. Because of the critical nature of the tasks, LifeCode has a unique "self-awarenes" feature that enables it to recognize the limits of its competence and thus ask for assistance from a human expert when faced with information that is beyond the bounds of its competence. The LifeCode NLP and Expert Systems are wrapped as DCOM servers and reside in various delivery packages including On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP), a web-browser interface and an Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) interface.