SummaryA new approach to the coding of medical nomenclature is described: According to this approach, medical terms would be coded in a free-standing fashion similarly as entries in most dictionaries. A general or master catalogue would serve as the operational basis for specialty field catalogues, each containing medical terms closely related. Thus, a symptom catalogue would contain only those terms which are used to describe patient complaints. Specific disease entities would have “blue prints” listed in a so-called “Lexicon”. The disease code would be appended by a digit indicating the accuracy of diagnosis and generated by comparing the patient’s data with the disease’s blue print. The proposed scheme could eliminate many shortcomings of presently employed coding systems.
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