THE LBI-METHOD FOR AUTOMATED INDEXING OF DIAGNOSES BY USING SNOMED .2. EVALUATION

We present a simple, formal, lexicon-based method for automated indexi ng of diagnoses based on the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SN OMED), called LBI-method. Part 1 gave an introduction to the LBI-metho d and presented its realisation as application system SALBIDH. Part 2 presents the design and the results of an evaluation study to judge th e quality of the LBI-method. In this evaluation study the quality of a utomated indexing as well as the quality of the retrieval of patient d ata by using automated indexed diagnoses was examined. The results sho w that the retrieval based on SNOMED indices is at least as good as th e retrieval based on ICD classes despite a lot of indexing errors. Fro m this we gather that our system is not yet good enough for immediate routine use but that an appropriate indexing quality and, as a result, a higher retrieval quality can be achieved after few improvements of the LBI-method, especially after revision of the lexicons.