Extending a medical language processing system to the functional status domain.

The World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) provides a common framework for describing functional status information (FSI) in health records. Given the expense of manual coding, we are investigating the use of natural language processing (NLP) for automated FSI coding. We used an existing NLP system that was originally designed to encode clinical information. The system's lexicon and coding table were modified and preprocessing and postprocessing programs were created, allowing for automated assignment of selected ICF codes.