A Turbo Pascal Program to Convert Icd-9Cm Coded Injury Diagnoses into Injury Severity Scores: Icdtoais

Abstract

Diagnoses of injuries as a result of trauma are commonly coded by means of the International Classification of Diseases (9th rev.) Clinical Modification (ICD-9CM). The Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) is frequently employed to assess the severity of injury per body region. The Injury Severity Score (ISS) is an over-all index or summary of the severity of injury. To compute one of these two types of scores the entire medical record of each patient must be examined. The program ICDTOAIS replaces the manual coding or translation between the two scores. The program converts the ICD-9CM coded diagnoses into AIS and ISS scores. The program also computes the maximum AIS (MAXAIS) per body region, enabling the researcher to assess the relative impact of the severity of trauma of different body regions in both morbidity and mortality studies. The program locates invalid ICD-9CM rubrics in the data file. ICDTOAIS may be employed as a program alone or as a procedure in database management systems (e.g., DBase III plus, DBase IV, or the different versions of FOXPRO). The program is written in Turbo Pascal, Version 6.