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The First ClinCode Conference in Tromsø

Participants from all over Scandinavia took part in the first ClinCode Conference in Tromsø, September 21, 2021.

- It was nice and important to meet all the talented people from different professions live in person after the lockdowns and discuss how to automatise the ICD-10 coding in a creative environment. We got plenty of ideas on how to proceed with the ClinCode project, says Professor Hercules Dalianis at the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research and Stockholm University, Sweden.

Computer Scientist Sonja Remmer from Stockholm University and Norwegian Centre for E-health Research presented her published results in predicting ICD-10 codes for 6 000 Swedish Gastro Discharge Summaries using Deep Learning BERT models.

Challenges

Lars Krum-Hansen physician and Lill Irene Hind, nurse and coder from the University Hospital of North Norway (UNN), described the challenges in assigning ICD-10 codes manually to discharge summaries, specifically to find all diagnosis the patients have been assigned during the whole healthcare period.

- Only 60 percent of the ICD-10 coding in Norway is correct, while 80 percent in Europe and approximately 90-95 percent in USA and England are correct due to that they have educated coders that do the work while in Norway young doctors does it. Physicians and coders therefore need more training in Norway, Krum-Hansen states.

Recommendation

One proposal is try adding all diagnosis in one place in the patient record system so they are easily visible and can be updated continuously. Lill also mentioned the tool Nimes that assist her in finding inconsistent codes so she can correct them.

Product manager for DIPS AS, Gerd Christensen, presented the ICD-10 coding support in the new Arena DIPS patient record system where one can enter diagnosis words and obtain the ICD-10 codes.

Other talks were made about creating privacy preserved machine learning models by Thomas Vakili from Stockholm University and automatically predicting headings for Finnish Nursing reports by Hans Moen from University of Turku in Finland.