Configuration of Medical Coding

Aim

This article briefly describes how to assign medical coding for providing the possibility to specialized users to add medical codes to answers within questionnaires.

Medical coding can be assigned to answers of a questionnaire which describe symptoms or a diagnosis. Systematic terminology dictionaries like MedDRA (“Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities”) are used to convert these answers given by a patient or physician into universal medical alphanumeric codes.

An additional permission “Medical Coding” is qualifying site or sponsor users to assign medical coding and add medical codes to answers. Sponsor users with the respective permission can additionally view the “Medical Coding Overview”, which displays already performed coding procedures.

Procedure

Assign Medical Coding

Step 1: Go to the menu section “UNITY Outcome” / subsection “Assign Medical Coding” (Figure 1).

Step 2: Choose a “Questionnaire” via the dropdown menu. All corresponding “Questions” of this questionnaire will appear subsequently in a table. Each question where medical coding should be assigned must be checked in the column “Assign Medical Coding”. Furthermore the “Terminology” browser, “Version” and “Language” need to be selected in the same row. By clicking on the green button at the right side the configuration is saved (Figure 2).

After changes are saved, the above-mentioned steps can be repeated for all questionnaires where medical coding should be assigned.