Auteurs : Michel Roland, Marc Jamoulle , Bernard Dendeau

In collaboration with Dr Werner Ceusters, Director R&D, Language and Computing SA

Good practice in family medicine requires clinical data to be registered in detail for individual patient management, while at the same time encoded for epidemiologic or scientific studies, or peer-review and practice quality improvement.

If the clinical language used by the physician differs a lot from the language used in a clinical coding system, or if the levels of detail are far apart, both activities (registration and coding) are to be done separately which is time consuming and may lead to coding errors.

LOCAS has been designed to overcome these problems. Based upon recent insights in formal clinical terminology management, LOCAS, a potentially multilingual product, bridges the gap between free clinical language and rigourous coding systems. Users can register clinical data just as they speak, while LOCAS automatically sends back to them the relevant classification code (ICPC or ICD-10 for instance).

Based on the International Classification of Primary Care
ICPC, Oxford University Press, 1987.