How Are Coding Collisions without Punctuation Handled?

[TheCedarPrince]

Hi @InterdisciplinaryPhysicsTeam team,

Question for you all regarding #9 .
Given that punctuation in codes is not supported or valid in your implementation, how do you disambiguate codes that look like this:

E11.4
E11.40

when E11.4 means "Type 2 diabetes mellitus with neurological complications" and E11.40refers to "Type 2 diabetes mellitus with diabetic neuropathy, unspecified"?
Do you preserve zeros and then map the 4 digit code to the 4 digit billing code and the 5 digit code to the 5 digit billing code?
The reason I was wondering is I have done analysis incorrectly in the past when I remove punctuation like this and accidentally map to different codes - was curious how you handled this issue as I had to resort to a lot of manual manipulation.

[InterdisciplinaryPhysicsTeam]

Hi @TheCedarPrince,

Thanks for this discussion!

Since this package has been originally thought as a translation utility, it only deals with codes (like E1140) and not directly with (sub)categories (like E114). After all, (sub)categories are not reported in the CDC's GEM files as single entries (they only contain codes), so we don't have a hard-coded correspondence between ICD-10 (sub)categories and ICD-9 (sub)categories and vice-versa.

Anyway you may get the "translation of a (sub)category" by specifying it as a range in the conversion utility:

using ICD_GEMs

subcategory_ICD9 = execute_applied_mapping(GEM_I10_I9_dictionary, ["E114-E114"])

The signature "E114-E114" means "all codes from the first that starts with E114 to the last that ends with E114". Notice that you can have arbitrary precision (i.e. number of digits) on both ends. To see all ICD-10 codes that are included in the subcategory E144, you may refer to the function:

get_ICD_code_range("E114-E114", "ICD-10")

6-element Vector{String}:
 "E1140"
 "E1141"
 "E1142"
 "E1143"
 "E1144"
 "E1149"

More details in the docs and in the GEMs official documentation.

If you think you'd benefit from an extension of this package, please consider submitting a PR or filing a feature request.

CC: @pitmonticone @ClaudMor