Improving Patient Care in the ER through Diagnosis Coding of Medical Notes

Fellows: Mureji Fatunde, Jennah Gosciak, Christina Last, Kennedy Odongo
Data Science Mentor(s): Liliana Millán
Project Manager: Erika Salomon
Project Partner: Indus Hospital and Health Network (Pakistan)

We are partnering with the Indus Hospital and Health Network, a free healthcare provider in Pakistan serving more than 5.4 million patients a year, to help them improve patient care and outcomes by creating standardized medical diagnosis codes from medical records and patient notes taken by nurses and doctors in the emergency department. The high volume of patients coming into the ER and the focus on immediate triage and medical care results in medical staff taking free-text notes to prioritize immediate intake, triage, and treatment but hinder the hospital system from creating structured and consistent treatment workflows, and track public health outcomes to anticipate disease outbreaks.  Our work with IHHN focuses on building a system that can help them turn nurse and physician notes into structured ICD-10 codes that can be used to create workflows and tools for physicians, nurses, and hospital staff as they work to improve patient care and outcomes.